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What is the Document Object Model?

Editors:

Philippe Le Hégaret, W3C

Lauren Wood, SoftQuad Software Inc. (for DOM Level 2)

Jonathan Robie, Texcel (for DOM Level 1)

Introduction

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an application programming interface
(API) for valid HTML and
well-formed XML documents. It defines the logical structure of documents and
the way a document is accessed and manipulated. In the DOM specification,
the term "document" is used in the broad sense - increasingly, XML is being used as a
way of representing many different kinds of information that may
be stored in diverse systems, and much of this would traditionally
be seen as data rather than as documents. Nevertheless, XML presents
this data as documents, and the DOM may be used to manage this data.

With the Document
Object Model, programmers can build documents, navigate
their structure, and add, modify, or delete elements and content.
Anything found in an HTML or XML document can be accessed,
changed, deleted, or added using the Document Object Model,
with a few exceptions - in particular, the DOM interfaces for
the XML internal and external subsets have not yet been specified.

As a W3C specification, one important objective for the Document
Object Model is to provide a standard programming interface that
can be used in a wide variety of environments and applications.
The DOM is designed to be used with any programming
language. In order to provide a precise, language-independent
specification of the DOM interfaces, we have chosen to define
the specifications in Object Management Group (OMG) IDL [OMG IDL], as defined in the CORBA 2.3.1 specification [CORBA]. In addition to the OMG IDL specification, we provide
language bindings for Java [Java] and ECMAScript [ECMAScript] (an industry-standard scripting
language based on JavaScript [JavaScript] and JScript
[JScript]). Because of language
binding restrictions, a mapping has to be applied between the OMG
IDL and the programming language in used. For example, while the
DOM uses IDL attributes in the definition of interfaces, Java does
not allow interfaces to contain attributes:

// example 1: removing the first child of an element using ECMAScript
mySecondTrElement.removeChild(mySecondTrElement.firstChild);
// example 2: removing the first child of an element using Java
mySecondTrElement.removeChild(mySecondTrElement.getFirstChild());

Note: OMG IDL is used only as a language-independent and
implementation-neutral way to specify interfaces. Various other
IDLs could have been used ([COM], [Java IDL], [MIDL], ...). In general, IDLs
are designed for specific computing environments. The Document Object
Model can be implemented in any computing environment, and does not
require the object binding runtimes generally associated with
such IDLs.

What the Document Object Model is

The DOM is a programming API for documents.
It is based on an object structure that closely resembles the structure of the
documents it models. For instance, consider this table, taken
from an XHTML document:

In the DOM, documents have a logical
structure which is very much like a tree; to be more precise, which is
like a "forest" or "grove",
which can contain more than one tree. Each document contains zero or one
doctype nodes, one document element node,
and zero or more comments
or processing instructions; the document element serves as the root
of the element tree for the document. However, the DOM
does not specify that documents must be implemented as a
tree or a grove, nor
does it specify how the relationships among objects be
implemented. The DOM is a logical model that may be implemented in any
convenient manner. In this
specification, we use the term structure model to
describe the tree-like representation of a document.
We also use the term "tree" when referring to the arrangement of
those information items which can be reached by using "tree-walking"
methods; (this does not include attributes).
One important property of DOM structure models
is structural isomorphism: if any two Document
Object Model implementations are used to create a representation
of the same document, they will create the same structure model,
in accordance with the XML Information Set [XML Information set].

Note: There may be some variations depending on the parser being
used to build the DOM. For instance, the DOM may not contain
white spaces in element content if the parser discards them.

The name "Document Object Model" was chosen because
it is an "object model" in the traditional
object oriented design sense: documents are modeled using
objects, and the model encompasses not only the structure of a
document, but also the behavior of a document and the objects
of which it is composed. In other words, the nodes in the
above diagram do not represent a data structure, they
represent objects, which have functions and identity. As an
object model, the DOM identifies:

the interfaces and objects used to represent and manipulate
a document

the semantics of these interfaces and objects - including
both behavior and attributes

the relationships and collaborations among these interfaces
and objects

The structure of SGML documents has traditionally been
represented by an abstract data model, not by an object model.
In an abstract data model, the model is centered around the
data. In object oriented programming languages, the data itself
is encapsulated in objects that hide the data, protecting it
from direct external manipulation. The functions associated with
these objects determine how the objects may be manipulated, and
they are part of the object model.

What the Document Object Model is not

This section is designed to give a more precise understanding
of the DOM by distinguishing it from other
systems that may seem to be like it.

The Document Object Model is not a binary specification.
DOM programs written in the same language binding will be
source code compatible across platforms, but the DOM
does not define any form of binary interoperability.

The Document Object Model is not a way of persisting objects
to XML or HTML. Instead of specifying how objects may be
represented in XML, the DOM specifies how
XML and HTML documents are represented as objects, so that
they may be used in object oriented programs.

The Document Object Model is not a set of data structures;
it is an object model that specifies interfaces. Although this
document contains diagrams showing parent/child relationships,
these are logical relationships defined by the programming
interfaces, not representations of any particular internal
data structures.

The Document Object Model does not define what information in a
document is relevant or how information in a document is structured. For
XML, this is specified by the XML Information Set [XML Information set]. The DOM is simply an API to this information set.

The Document Object Model, despite its name, is not a
competitor to the Component Object Model [COM]. COM, like
CORBA, is a language independent way to specify interfaces and
objects; the DOM is a set of interfaces and
objects designed for managing HTML and XML documents. The DOM
may be implemented using language-independent systems like COM
or CORBA; it may also be implemented using language-specific
bindings like the Java or ECMAScript bindings specified in
this document.

Where the Document Object Model came from

The DOM originated as a specification to
allow JavaScript scripts and Java programs to be portable among
Web browsers. "Dynamic HTML" was the immediate ancestor of the
Document Object Model, and it was originally thought of largely
in terms of browsers. However, when the DOM
Working Group was formed at W3C, it was also joined by vendors in other
domains, including HTML or XML editors and document
repositories. Several of these vendors had worked with SGML
before XML was developed; as a result, the DOM
has been influenced by SGML Groves and the HyTime standard. Some
of these vendors had also developed their own object models for
documents in order to provide an API for SGML/XML
editors or document repositories, and these object models have
also influenced the DOM.

Entities and the DOM Core

In the fundamental DOM interfaces, there are no objects representing
entities. Numeric character references, and references to the
pre-defined entities in HTML and XML, are replaced by the
single character that makes up the entity's replacement.
For example, in:

<p>This is a dog &amp; a cat</p>

the "&amp;" will be replaced by the character "&", and the text
in the P element will form a single continuous sequence of
characters. Since numeric character references and pre-defined entities
are not recognized as such in CDATA sections, or in the SCRIPT and STYLE
elements in HTML, they are not replaced by the single character they
appear to refer to. If the example above were enclosed in a CDATA
section, the "&amp;" would not be replaced by "&"; neither would
the <p> be recognized as a start tag. The representation of general
entities, both internal and external, are defined within the
extended (XML) interfaces of Document Object Model Core.

Note: When a DOM representation of a document is serialized
as XML or HTML text, applications will need to check each
character in text data to see if it needs to be escaped
using a numeric or pre-defined entity. Failing to do so
could result in invalid HTML or XML. Also, implementations should be
aware of the fact that serialization into a character encoding
("charset") that does not fully cover ISO 10646 may fail if there are
characters in markup or CDATA sections that are not present in the
encoding.

DOM Architecture

The DOM specifications provide a set of APIs that forms the DOM
API. Each DOM specification defines one or more modules and each
module is associated with one feature name. For example, the DOM
Core specification (this specification) defines two modules:

The Core module, which contains the fundamental interfaces
that must be implemented by all DOM conformant
implementations, is associated with the feature name "Core";

The XML module, which contains the interfaces that must be
implemented by all conformant XML 1.0 [XML 1.0] (and higher) DOM implementations, is
associated with the feature name "XML".

The following representation contains all DOM modules, represented
using their feature names, defined along the DOM specifications:

A DOM implementation can then implement one (i.e. only the Core
module) or more modules depending on the host application. A Web
user agent is very likely to implement the "MouseEvents" module,
while a server-side application will have no use of this module
and will probably not implement it.

Conformance

This section explains the different levels of conformance to DOM Level 3.
DOM Level 3 consists of 16 modules. It is possible to conform to DOM
Level 3, or to a DOM Level 3 module.

An implementation is DOM Level 3 conformant if it supports the Core
module defined in this document (see Fundamental Interfaces: Core module). An
implementation conforms to a DOM Level 3 module if it supports all the
interfaces for that module and the associated semantics.

Here is the complete list of DOM Level 3.0 modules and the features used
by them. Feature names are case-insensitive.

DOM Interfaces and DOM Implementations

The DOM specifies interfaces which may be used to manage XML or
HTML documents. It is important to realize that these interfaces
are an abstraction - much like "abstract base classes" in C++,
they are a means of specifying a way to access and manipulate an
application's internal representation of a document. Interfaces
do not imply a particular concrete
implementation. Each DOM application is free to maintain
documents in any convenient representation, as long as the
interfaces shown in this specification are supported. Some
DOM implementations will be existing programs that use the
DOM interfaces to access software written long before the
DOM specification existed. Therefore, the DOM is designed
to avoid implementation dependencies; in particular,

Attributes defined in the IDL do not imply concrete
objects which must have specific data members - in the
language bindings, they are translated to a pair of
get()/set() functions, not to a data member. Read-only
attributes have only a get() function in the language
bindings.

DOM applications may provide additional interfaces
and objects not found in this specification and still be
considered DOM conformant.

Because we specify interfaces and not the actual
objects that are to be created, the DOM cannot know what
constructors to call for an implementation. In general,
DOM users call the createX() methods on the Document
class to create document structures, and DOM
implementations create their own internal representations
of these structures in their implementations of the
createX() functions.

The Level 2 interfaces were extended to provide both Level 2 and Level 3
functionality.

DOM implementations in languages other than Java or ECMAScript may choose
bindings that are appropriate and natural for their language and run time
environment. For example, some systems may need to create a Document3
class which inherits from a Document class and contains the new methods
and attributes.

This specification defines a set of objects and interfaces for
accessing and manipulating document objects. The functionality
specified (the Core functionality) is sufficient to
allow software developers and web script authors to access and
manipulate parsed HTML [HTML 4.01] and
XML [XML 1.0] content inside conforming
products. The DOM Core API also
allows creation and population of a Document object
using only DOM API calls. A solution for loading a
Document and saving it persistently is proposed in
[DOM Level 3 Load and Save].

1.1
Overview of the DOM Core Interfaces

1.1.1
The DOM Structure Model

The DOM presents documents as a hierarchy of Node objects
that also implement other, more specialized interfaces. Some types of
nodes may have child nodes of various
types, and others are leaf nodes that cannot have anything below them
in the document structure. For XML and HTML, the node types, and which
node types they may have as children, are as follows:

1.1.2
Memory Management

Most of the APIs defined by this specification are
interfaces rather than classes. That means that an
implementation need only expose methods with the defined names and
specified operation, not implement classes that correspond directly to
the interfaces. This allows the DOM APIs to be implemented as a thin
veneer on top of legacy applications with their own data structures, or
on top of newer applications with different class hierarchies. This
also means that ordinary constructors (in the Java or C++ sense) cannot
be used to create DOM objects, since the underlying objects to be
constructed may have little relationship to the DOM interfaces. The
conventional solution to this in object-oriented design is to define
factory methods that create instances of objects that
implement the various interfaces. Objects implementing some interface
"X" are created by a "createX()" method on the Document
interface; this is because all DOM objects live in the context of a
specific Document.

The Core DOM APIs are designed to be compatible with a wide range of
languages, including both general-user scripting languages and the more
challenging languages used mostly by professional programmers. Thus,
the DOM APIs need to operate across a variety of memory management
philosophies, from language bindings that do not expose memory
management to the user at all, through those (notably Java) that
provide explicit constructors but provide an automatic garbage
collection mechanism to automatically reclaim unused memory, to those
(especially C/C++) that generally require the programmer to explicitly
allocate object memory, track where it is used, and explicitly free it
for re-use. To ensure a consistent API across these platforms, the DOM
does not address memory management issues at all, but instead leaves
these for the implementation. Neither of the explicit language bindings
defined by the DOM API (for
ECMAScript and Java) require any
memory management methods, but DOM bindings for other languages
(especially C or C++) may require such support. These extensions will
be the responsibility of those adapting the DOM API to a specific
language, not the DOM Working Group.

1.1.3
Naming Conventions

While it would be nice to have attribute and method names that are
short, informative, internally consistent, and familiar to users of
similar APIs, the names also should not clash with the names in legacy
APIs supported by DOM implementations. Furthermore, both OMG IDL [OMG IDL] and ECMAScript [ECMAScript] have significant limitations in their ability
to disambiguate names from different namespaces that make it difficult
to avoid naming conflicts with short, familiar names. So, DOM names
tend to be long and descriptive in order to be unique across all
environments.

The Working Group has also attempted to be internally consistent in
its use of various terms, even though these may not be common
distinctions in other APIs. For example, the DOM API uses the method
name "remove" when the method changes the structural model, and the
method name "delete" when the method gets rid of something inside the
structure model. The thing that is deleted is not returned. The thing
that is removed may be returned, when it makes sense to return it.

1.1.4
Inheritance vs. Flattened Views of the API

The DOM Core APIs present two somewhat
different sets of interfaces to an XML/HTML document: one presenting an
"object oriented" approach with a hierarchy of
inheritance, and a "simplified"
view that allows all manipulation to be done via the Node
interface without requiring casts (in Java and other C-like languages)
or query interface calls in COM
environments. These operations are fairly expensive in Java and COM,
and the DOM may be used in performance-critical environments, so we
allow significant functionality using just the Node
interface. Because many other users will find the
inheritance hierarchy easier to
understand than the "everything is a Node" approach to the
DOM, we also support the full higher-level interfaces for those who
prefer a more object-oriented API.

In practice, this means that there is a certain amount of redundancy
in the API. The Working Group considers
the "inheritance" approach the
primary view of the API, and the full set of functionality on
Node to be "extra" functionality that users may employ,
but that does not eliminate the need for methods on other interfaces
that an object-oriented analysis would dictate. (Of course, when the
O-O analysis yields an attribute or method that is identical to one on
the Node interface, we don't specify a completely
redundant one.) Thus, even though there is a generic
Node.nodeName attribute on the Node interface,
there is still a Element.tagName attribute on the
Element interface; these two attributes must contain the
same value, but the it is worthwhile to support both, given the
different constituencies the DOM API
must satisfy.

1.2
Primitive types

To ensure interoperability, this specification specifies the following
primitive types used in various DOM modules. Even though the DOM
uses the primitive types in the interfaces, bindings may use
different types and normative bindings are only given for Java and
ECMAScript in this specification.

The DOMString type is used to store [Unicode] characters as a code unit string as
defined in section 3.4 of [CharModel]. Applications
must encode the characters using UTF-16 as defined in [Unicode] and Amendment 1 of [ISO/IEC 10646].

The UTF-16 encoding was chosen because of its widespread industry
practice. Note that for both HTML and XML, the document character set
(and therefore the notation of numeric character references) is based on
UCS [ISO/IEC 10646]. A single numeric character reference in a
source document may therefore in some cases correspond to two 16-bit
units in a DOMString (a high surrogate and a low
surrogate). For issues related to string comparisons, refer to
String comparisons in the DOM.

For Java and ECMAScript, DOMString is bound to the
String type because both languages also use UTF-16
as their encoding.

Note: As of August 2000, the OMG IDL specification
([OMG IDL]) included a wstring
type. However, that definition did not meet the interoperability
criteria of the DOM API since it
relied on negotiation to decide the width and encoding of a
character.

1.3
General considerations

1.3.1
String comparisons in the DOM

The DOM has many interfaces that imply string matching. For
XML, string comparisons are case-sensitive and performed with a
binary comparison of
the 16-bit units of the
DOMStrings. However, for case-insensitive markup
languages, such as HTML 4.01 or earlier, these comparisons are
case-insensitive where appropriate.

Note that HTML processors often perform specific case
normalizations (canonicalization) of the markup before the DOM
structures are built. This is typically using uppercase for
element names and lowercase
for attribute names. For this reason, applications should also
compare element and attribute names returned by the DOM
implementation in a case-insensitive manner.

The character normalization, as defined in [CharModel], is assumed to happen at serialization time. The
DOM Level 3 Load and Save module [DOM Level 3 Load and Save] provides a serialization mechanism (see the
DOMSerializer interface, section 2.3.1) and uses the
"normalize-characters" and
"check-character-normalization" to assure that text is
fully-normalized (see section 4.2.3 in [CharModel]. Other serialization mechanisms built on top of
the DOM Level 3 Core also have to assure that text is
fully-normalized.

1.3.2
DOM URIs

The DOM specification relies on DOMString values as
resource identifiers, such that the following conditions are
met:

A complete identifier absolutely identifies a resource on
the web;

Simple string equality establishes equality of complete
resource identifiers, and no other equivalence of resource
identifiers is considered significant to the DOM
specification;

An incomplete identifier is easily detected and completed
relative to a complete identifier;

Retrieval of content of a resource may be accomplished where
required.

Within the DOM specifications, these identifiers are called
URIs, "Universal Resource Identifiers", but this is meant
abstractly. The DOM implementation does not necessarily process
its URIs according to the URI specification [IETF RFC 2396].

Generally the particular form of these identifiers must be
ignored.

When is not possible to completely ignore the type of any DOM
URI, either because an incomplete identifier must be completed
or because content must be retrieved, the DOM implementation
must at least support types appropriate to the content being
processed. Whereas [HTML 4.01],
[XML 1.0], and associated namespace
specification [XML Namespaces] rely
on [IETF RFC 2396], other
specifications such as namespaces in XML 1.1 [XML Namespaces 1.1] may rely on alternative
resource identifier types, requiring support for alternative
resource identifier types where required by applicable
specifications.

Regardless of the exact type of a DOM URI, the term
"absolute URI" refers to a complete resource
identifier and the term "relative URI" refers to an
incomplete resource identifier.

As far as the DOM is concerned, special attributes used for declaring
XML namespaces are still
exposed and can be manipulated just like any other attribute. However,
nodes are permanently bound to namespace
URIs as they get created. Consequently, moving a node
within a document, using the DOM, in no case results in a change of its
namespace prefix or
namespace URI. Similarly, creating a node with a namespace prefix and
namespace URI, or changing the namespace prefix of a node, does not
result in any addition, removal, or modification of any special
attributes for declaring the appropriate XML namespaces. Namespace
validation is not enforced; the DOM application is responsible. In
particular, since the mapping between prefixes and namespace URIs is
not enforced, in general, the resulting document cannot be serialized
naively. For example, applications may have to declare every namespace
in use when serializing a document.

In general, the DOM implementation (and higher) doesn't perform any
URI normalization or canonicalization. The URIs given to the DOM are
assumed to be valid (e.g., characters such as white spaces are properly
escaped), and no lexical checking is performed. Absolute URI references
are treated as strings and compared
literally. How relative namespace URI references are
treated is undefined. To ensure interoperability only absolute
namespace URI references (i.e., URI references beginning with a scheme
name and a colon) should be used. Applications should use the
value null as the namespaceURI
parameter
for methods if they wish to have no namespace. In programming
languages where empty strings can be differentiated from null,
the way empty strings are treated, when given as a namespace URI
to a DOM Level 2 method, is implementation dependent. This is
true even though the DOM does no lexical checking of URIs.

Note: In the DOM, all namespace declaration attributes are by
definition bound to the namespace URI:
"http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/". These are the attributes
whose namespace prefix or
qualified name is
"xmlns". Although, at the time of writing, this is not part of the
XML Namespaces specification [XML Namespaces], it is
planned to be incorporated in a future revision.

In a document with no namespaces, the
child list of an
EntityReference node is always the same as that of the
corresponding Entity. This is not true in a document where
an entity contains unbound namespace
prefixes. In such a case, the
descendants of the corresponding
EntityReference nodes may be bound to different
namespace URIs, depending on
where the entity references are. Also, because, in the DOM, nodes
always remain bound to the same namespace URI, moving such
EntityReference nodes can lead to documents that cannot be
serialized. This is also true when the DOM Level 1 method
Document.createEntityReference(name) is used to create
entity references that correspond to such
entities, since the descendants
of the returned EntityReference are unbound. The DOM Level
2 does not support any mechanism to resolve namespace prefixes. For all
of these reasons, use of such entities and entity references should be
avoided or used with extreme care. A future Level of the DOM may
include some additional support for handling these.

1.3.4
Base URIs

The DOM Level 3 adds support for the [base URI] property
defined in
[XML Information set] by providing a new attribute on the
Node interface that exposes this information. However,
unlike the Node.namespaceURI attribute, the
Node.baseURI attribute is not a static piece of information
that every node carries. Instead, it is a value that is dynamically
computed according to [XML Base]. This means its value
depends on the location of the node in the tree and moving the node
from one place to another in the tree may affect its value. Other
changes, such as adding or changing an xml:base attribute on the node
being queried or one of its ancestors may also affect its value.

One consequence of this it that when external entity references are
expanded while building a Document one may need to add, or
change, an xml:base attribute to the
Element nodes originally contained in the entity being
expanded so that the Node.baseURI returns the correct value. In
the case of ProcessingInstruction nodes originally
contained in the entity being expanded the information is lost.
[DOM Level 3 Load and Save] handles elements as described
here and generates a warning in the latter case.

1.3.5
Mixed DOM implementations

As new XML vocabularies are developed, those defining the vocabularies
are also beginning to define specialized APIs for manipulating XML
instances of those vocabularies. This is usually done by extending the
DOM to provide interfaces and methods that perform operations
frequently needed their users. For example, the MathML [MathML 2.0] and SVG
[SVG 1.0] specifications are developing DOM extensions to allow users to
manipulate instances of these vocabularies using semantics appropriate
to images and mathematics (respectively) as well as the generic DOM XML
semantics. Instances of SVG or MathML are often embedded in XML
documents conforming to a different schema such as XHTML.

While the Namespaces in XML specification [XML Namespaces] provides a mechanism for integrating these
documents at the syntax level, it has become clear that the DOM
Level 2 Recommendation [DOM Level 2 Core] is not rich enough to cover all the issues that
have been encountered in having these different DOM
implementations be used together in a single application. DOM
Level 3 deals with the requirements brought about by embedding
fragments written according to a specific markup language (the
embedded component) in a document where the rest of the markup
is not written according to that specific markup language (the
host document). It does not deal with fragments embedded by
reference or linking.

A DOM implementation supporting DOM Level 3 Core should be able to
collaborate with subcomponents implementing specific DOMs to assemble a
compound document that can be traversed and manipulated via DOM
interfaces as if it were a seamless whole.

The normal typecast operation on an object should support the
interfaces expected by legacy code for a given document type.
Typecasting techniques may not be adequate for selecting between
multiple DOM specializations of an object which were combined at run
time, because they may not all be part of the same object as defined by
the binding's object model. Conflicts are most obvious with the
Document object, since it is shared as owner by the rest
of the document. In a homogeneous document, elements rely on the
Document for specialized services and construction of specialized
nodes. In a heterogeneous document, elements from different modules
expect different services and APIs from the same Document
object, since there can only be one owner and root of the document
hierarchy.

1.3.6
DOM Features

Each DOM module defines one or more features, as listed in the
conformance section (Conformance). Features
are case-insensitive and are also defined for a specific set of
versions. For example, this specification defines the features
"Core" and "XML", and thus for the
versions "1.0", "2.0", and
"3.0". To avoid possible conflicts, as a
convention, names referring to features defined outside the DOM
specification should be made unique. Applications could then
request for features to be supported by a DOM implementation
using the methods
DOMImplementationSource.getDOMImplementation(features) or
DOMImplementationSource.getDOMImplementations(features),
check the features supported by a DOM implementation using the
method DOMImplementation.hasFeature(feature, version), or by a
specific node using Node.isSupported(feature, version). Note that
when using the methods that take a feature and a version as
parameters, applications can use null or empty
string for the version parameter if they don't wish to specify a
particular version for the specified feature.

Up to the DOM Level 2 modules, all interfaces, that were an
extension of existing ones, were accessible using
binding-specific casting mechanisms if the feature associated to
the extension was supported. For example, an instance of the
EventTarget interface could be obtained from an
instance of the Node interface if the feature
"Events" was supported by the node.

As discussed Mixed DOM implementations, DOM Level 3 Core
should be able to collaborate with subcomponents implementing
specific DOMs. For that effect, the methods
DOMImplementation.getFeature(feature, version) and
Node.getFeature(feature, version) were introduced. If a plus sign "+"
is prepended to any feature name, implementations are considered
in which the specified feature may not be directly castable but
would require discovery through getFeature.
Without a plus, only features whose interfaces are directly
castable are considered.

1.3.7
Bootstrapping

Because previous versions of the DOM specification only defined a set
of interfaces, applications had to rely on some implementation
dependent code to start from. However, hard-coding the application to a
specific implementation prevents the application from running on other
implementations and from using the most-suitable implementation of the
environment. At the same time, implementations may also need to load
modules or perform other setup to efficiently adapt to different and
sometimes mutually-exclusive feature sets.

To solve these problems this specification introduces a
DOMImplementationRegistry object with a function that lets
an application find implementations, based on the specific features
it requires. How this object is found and what it exactly looks like is
not defined here, because this cannot be done in a language-independent
manner. Instead, each language binding defines its own way of doing
this. See Java Language Binding and
ECMAScript Language Binding for specifics.

In all cases, though, the DOMImplementationRegistry
provides a getDOMImplementation method accepting a
features string, which is passed to every known
DOMImplementationSource until a suitable
DOMImplementation is found and returned.
The DOMImplementationRegistry
also provides a getDOMImplementations method accepting a
features string, which is passed to every known
DOMImplementationSource, and returns a list of suitable
DOMImplementations. Those two methods are
the same as the ones found on the DOMImplementationSource
interface defined below.

1.4
Fundamental Interfaces: Core module

The interfaces within this section are considered
fundamental, and must be fully implemented by all conforming
implementations of the DOM, including all HTML DOM implementations
[DOM Level 2 HTML], unless otherwise specified.

A DOM application may use the
DOMImplementation.hasFeature(feature, version) method
with parameter values "Core" and "3.0" (respectively) to determine
whether or not this module is supported by the implementation. Any
implementation that conforms to DOM Level 3 or a DOM Level 3 module
must conform to the Core module. Please refer to additional
information about conformance in this specification. The DOM Level 3 Core
module is backward compatible with the DOM Level 2 Core [DOM Level 2 Core] module, i.e. a DOM Level 3 Core
implementation who returns true for "Core" with the
version number "3.0" must also return
true for this feature when the
version number is "2.0", ""
or, null.

DOM operations only raise exceptions in "exceptional"
circumstances, i.e., when an operation is impossible to perform (either
for logical reasons, because data is lost, or because the implementation
has become unstable). In general, DOM methods return specific error
values in ordinary processing situations, such as out-of-bound errors
when using NodeList.

Implementations should raise other exceptions under other circumstances.
For example, implementations should raise an implementation-dependent
exception if a null argument is passed when
null was not expected.

Some languages and object systems do not support the concept of
exceptions. For such systems, error conditions may be indicated using
native error reporting mechanisms. For some bindings, for example,
methods may return error codes similar to those listed in the
corresponding method descriptions.

If a call to a method such as insertBefore or
removeChild would make the Node invalid with
respect to "partial
validity", this exception would be raised and the operation
would not be done. This code is used in [DOM Level 3 Validation]. Refer to this specification for further information.

The DOMStringList interface provides the abstraction
of an ordered collection of parallel pairs of name and namespace
values, without defining or constraining how this collection is
implemented. The items in the DOMStringList are accessible
via an integral index, starting from 0.

The NameList interface provides the abstraction of an
ordered collection of parallel pairs of name and namespace values,
without defining or constraining how this collection is
implemented. The items in the NameList are accessible
via an integral index, starting from 0.

The DOMImplementationList interface provides the
abstraction of an ordered collection of DOM implementations,
without defining or constraining how this collection is
implemented. The items in the DOMImplementationList
are accessible via an integral index, starting from 0.

This interface permits a DOM implementer to supply one or more
implementations, based upon requested features and versions, as
specified in DOM Features. Each implemented
DOMImplementationSource object is listed in the
binding-specific list of available sources so that its
DOMImplementation objects are made available.

A string that specifies which features and versions are
required. This is a space separated list in which each
feature is specified by its name optionally followed by a
space and a version number.
As an example, the string "XML 3.0 Traversal +Events
2.0" will request a DOM implementation that supports
the module "XML" for its 3.0 version, a module that support
of the "Traversal" module for any version, and the module
"Events" for its 2.0 version. The module "Events" must be
accessible using the method Node.getFeature() and
DOMImplementation.getFeature().

A string that specifies which features and versions are
required. This is a space separated list in which each feature
is specified by its name optionally followed by a space and a
version number. This is something like: "XML 3.0 Traversal
+Events 2.0"

Creates a DOM Document object of the specified type with its document
element.
Note that based on the DocumentType given to create the
document, the implementation may instantiate specialized
Document objects that support additional features than the
"Core", such as "HTML" [DOM Level 2 HTML].
On the other hand, setting the DocumentType after the
document was created makes this very unlikely to happen. Alternatively,
specialized Document creation methods, such as
createHTMLDocument
[DOM Level 2 HTML], can be used to obtain
specific types of Document objects.

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified qualified name
contains an illegal character according to [XML 1.0].

NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the qualifiedName is
malformed, if the qualifiedName has a prefix and the
namespaceURI is null, or if the
qualifiedName is null and the
namespaceURI is different from null, or if the
qualifiedName has a prefix that is "xml" and the
namespaceURI is different from
"http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" [XML Namespaces],
or if the DOM implementation does not support the
"XML" feature but a non-null namespace URI was
provided, since namespaces were defined by XML.

WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if doctype has already
been used with a different document or was created from a different
implementation.

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: May be raised if the implementation does
not support the feature "XML" and the language exposed
through the Document does not support XML Namespaces (such
as [HTML 4.01]).

This method returns a specialized object which implements the
specialized APIs of the specified feature and version, as
specified in DOM Features. The specialized
object may also be obtained by using binding-specific casting
methods but is not necessarily expected to, as discussed in
Mixed DOM implementations. This method also allow the
implementation to provide specialized objects which do not
support the DOMImplementation interface.

Returns an object which implements the specialized APIs of the
specified feature and version, if any, or null if
there is no object which implements interfaces associated with
that feature. If the DOMObject returned by this
method implements the DOMImplementation
interface, it must delegate to the primary core
DOMImplementation and not return results
inconsistent with the primary core
DOMImplementation such as
hasFeature, getFeature, etc.

DocumentFragment is a "lightweight" or "minimal"
Document object. It is very common to want to be able to
extract a portion of a document's tree or to create a new fragment of a
document. Imagine implementing a user command like cut or rearranging a
document by moving fragments around. It is desirable to have an object
which can hold such fragments and it is quite natural to use a Node for
this purpose. While it is true that a Document object could
fulfill this role, a Document object can potentially be a
heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is
really needed for this is a very lightweight
object. DocumentFragment is such an object.

Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children
of another Node -- may take DocumentFragment
objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the
DocumentFragment being moved to the child list of this
node.

The children of a DocumentFragment node are zero or more
nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of
the document. DocumentFragment nodes do not need to be
well-formed XML documents
(although they do need to follow the rules imposed upon well-formed XML
parsed entities, which can have multiple top nodes). For example, a
DocumentFragment might have only one child and that child
node could be a Text node. Such a structure model represents
neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML document.

When a DocumentFragment is inserted into a
Document (or indeed any other Node that may
take children) the children of the DocumentFragment and not
the DocumentFragment itself are inserted into the
Node. This makes the DocumentFragment very
useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are
siblings; the
DocumentFragment acts as the parent of these nodes so that
the user can use the standard methods from the Node
interface, such as insertBefore and
appendChild.

The Document interface represents the entire HTML or XML
document. Conceptually, it is the
root of the document tree, and
provides the primary access to the document's data.

Since elements, text nodes, comments, processing instructions,
etc. cannot exist outside the context of a Document, the
Document interface also contains the factory methods needed
to create these objects. The Node objects created have a
ownerDocument attribute which associates them with the
Document within whose context they were created.

The Document Type Declaration (see DocumentType)
associated with this document. For HTML documents as well as XML
documents without a document type declaration this returns
null.
This provides direct access to the DocumentType node,
child node of this Document. This node can be set at
document creation time and later changed through the use of child nodes
manipulation methods, such as insertBefore, or
replaceChild. Note, however, that while some
implementations may instantiate different types of
Document objects supporting additional features than the
"Core", such as "HTML" [DOM Level 2 HTML],
based on the DocumentType specified at creation time,
changing it afterwards is very unlikely to result in a change of the
features supported.

The location of the document or null if undefined.
Beware that when the Document supports the feature "HTML"
[DOM Level 2 HTML], the href attribute of the HTML BASE element
takes precedence over this attribute.

An attribute specifying whether error checking is enforced or
not. When set to false, the implementation is free to
not test every possible error case normally defined on DOM
operations, and not raise any DOMException on DOM
operations or report errors while using
Document.normalizeDocument(). In case of error, the
behavior is undefined. This attribute is true by
default.

An attribute specifying, as part of the XML declaration, the
version number of this document. If there is no declaration, the
value is "1.0". Changing this attribute will affect
methods that check for illegal characters in XML names. Application
should invoke Document.normalizeDocument() in order to check
for illegal characters in the Nodes that
are already part of this Document.

Changes the ownerDocument of a node, its children,
as well as the attached attribute nodes if there are any. If the node
has a parent it is first removed from its parent child list. This
effectively allows moving a subtree from one document to another. The
following list describes the specifics for each type of node.

ATTRIBUTE_NODE

The ownerElement attribute is set to
null and the specified flag is set to
true on the adopted Attr. The
descendants of the source Attr are recursively
adopted.

Specified attribute nodes of the source element
are adopted, and the generated Attr nodes. Default
attributes are discarded, though if the document being adopted
into defines default attributes for this element name, those
are assigned. The descendants of the source element are
recursively adopted.

Only the EntityReference node itself is adopted,
the descendants are discarded, since the source and destination
documents might have defined the entity differently. If the
document being imported into provides a definition for this
entity name, its value is assigned.

Creates an Attr of the given name. Note that the
Attr instance can then be set on an Element
using the setAttributeNode method.
To create an attribute with a qualified name and namespace URI, use
the createAttributeNS method.

Creates an element of the type specified. Note that the instance
returned implements the Element interface, so attributes
can be specified directly on the returned object.
In addition, if there are known attributes with default values,
Attr nodes representing them are automatically created and
attached to the element.
To create an element with a qualified name and namespace URI, use the
createElementNS method.

The name of the element type to instantiate. For XML, this is
case-sensitive, otherwise it depends on the case-sensitivity of the
markup language in use. In that case, the name is mapped to the
canonical form of that markup by the DOM implementation.

Creates an EntityReference object. In addition, if the
referenced entity is known, the child list of the
EntityReference node is made the same as that of the
corresponding Entity node.

Note: If any descendant of the Entity node has an unbound
namespace prefix, the
corresponding descendant of the created EntityReference
node is also unbound; (its namespaceURI is
null). The DOM Level 2 and 3 do not support any mechanism to
resolve namespace prefixes in this case.

Returns the Element that has an ID attribute with the
given value. If no such element exists, this returns null.
If more than one element has an ID attribute with that value, what
is returned is undefined.
The DOM implementation is expected to use the method
Attr.isId() to determine if an attribute is of type
ID.

Note: Attributes with the name "ID" or "id" are not of type ID unless
so defined.

Imports a node from another document to this document. The returned
node has no parent; (parentNode is null). The
source node is not altered or removed from the original document; this
method creates a new copy of the source node.
For all nodes, importing a node creates a node object owned by the
importing document, with attribute values identical to the source
node's nodeName and nodeType, plus the
attributes related to namespaces (prefix,
localName, and namespaceURI). As in the
cloneNode operation, the source node is not altered. User
data associated to the imported node is not carried over. However,
if any UserDataHandlers has been specified along with the
associated data these handlers will be called with the appropriate
parameters before this method returns.
Additional information is copied as appropriate to the
nodeType, attempting to mirror the behavior expected if a
fragment of XML or HTML source was copied from one document to another,
recognizing that the two documents may have different DTDs in the XML
case. The following list describes the specifics for each type of node.

ATTRIBUTE_NODE

The ownerElement attribute is set to
null and the specified flag is set to
true on the generated Attr. The
descendants of the
source Attr are recursively imported and the
resulting nodes reassembled to form the corresponding
subtree.
Note that the deep parameter has no effect on
Attr nodes; they always carry their children with
them when imported.

Specified attribute nodes of the source element
are imported, and the generated Attr nodes are
attached to the generated Element. Default
attributes are not copied, though if the document
being imported into defines default attributes for this element
name, those are assigned. If the importNodedeep parameter was set to true, the
descendants of the
source element are recursively imported and the resulting nodes
reassembled to form the corresponding subtree.

ENTITY_NODE

Entity nodes can be imported, however in the
current release of the DOM the DocumentType is
readonly. Ability to add these imported nodes to a
DocumentType will be considered for addition to a
future release of the DOM.
On import, the publicId, systemId,
and notationName attributes are copied. If a
deep import is requested, the
descendants of the
the source Entity are recursively imported and the
resulting nodes reassembled to form the corresponding
subtree.

ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE

Only the EntityReference itself is copied, even
if a deep import is requested, since the source
and destination documents might have defined the entity
differently. If the document being imported into provides a
definition for this entity name, its value is assigned.

NOTATION_NODE

Notation nodes can be imported, however in the
current release of the DOM the DocumentType is
readonly. Ability to add these imported nodes to a
DocumentType will be considered for addition to a
future release of the DOM.
On import, the publicId and
systemId attributes are copied.
Note that the deep parameter has no effect on
this type of nodes since they cannot have any children.

PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE

The imported node copies its target and
data values from those of the source node.
Note that the deep parameter has no effect on
this type of nodes since they cannot have any children.

TEXT_NODE, CDATA_SECTION_NODE, COMMENT_NODE

These three types of nodes inheriting from
CharacterData copy their data and
length attributes from those of the source
node.
Note that the deep parameter has no effect on
these types of nodes since they cannot have any children.

If true, recursively import the subtree under the
specified node; if false, import only the node itself,
as explained above. This has no effect on nodes that cannot have
any children, and on Attr, and
EntityReference nodes.

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: Raised if the type of node being imported
is not supported.

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if one the imported names contain an
illegal character according to the XML version in use
specified in the version attribute. This may happen when importing an XML 1.1
[XML 1.1] element into an XML 1.0 document, for
instance.

This method acts as if the document was going through a save and
load cycle, putting the document in a "normal" form. As a
consequence, this method updates the replacement tree of
EntityReference nodes and normalizes
Text nodes, as defined in the method
Node.normalize().
Otherwise, the actual result depends on the features being set
on the Document.config object and governing what
operations actually take place. Noticeably this method could
also make the document "namespace wellformed" according to the
algorithm described in Namespace normalization,
check the character normalization, remove the
CDATASection nodes, etc. See
DOMConfiguration for details.

Mutation events, when supported, are generated to reflect the changes
occurring on the document.
If errors occur during the invocation of this method, such as an
attempt to update a read-only
node or a Node.nodeName contains an
invalid character according to the XML version in use, errors
will be reported using the DOMErrorHandler object
associated with the "error-handler"
parameter. Note that this method does not generate fatal errors.

Rename an existing node of type ELEMENT_NODE or
ATTRIBUTE_NODE.
When possible this simply changes the name of the given node,
otherwise this creates a new node with the specified name and
replaces the existing node with the new node as described
below.
If simply changing the name of the given node is not possible,
the following operations are performed:
a new node is created, any registered event listener is registered on
the new node, any user data attached to the old node is removed from
that node, the old node is removed from its parent if it has one, the
children are moved to the new node, if the renamed node is an
Element its attributes are moved to the new node,
the new node is inserted at the position the old node used to have in
its parent's child nodes list if it has one, the user data that was
attached to the old node is attached to the new node.
When the node being renamed is an Element only the
specified attributes are moved, default attributes originated from the
DTD are updated according to the new element name. In addition, the
implementation may update default attributes from other
schemas. Applications should use
Document.normalizeDocument() to guarantee these
attributes are up-to-date.
When the node being renamed is an Attr that is attached
to an Element, the node is first removed from the
Element attributes map. Then, once renamed, either by
modifying the existing node or creating a new one as described above,
it is put back.
In addition,

a user data event NODE_RENAMED is fired,

when the implementation supports the feature
"MutationNameEvents", each mutation operation involved in
this method fires the appropriate event, and in the end the
event {http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events,
DOMElementNameChanged} or
{http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events,
DOMAttributeNameChanged} is fired.

The Node interface is the primary datatype for the entire
Document Object Model. It represents a single node in the document
tree. While all objects implementing the Node interface
expose methods for dealing with children, not all objects implementing
the Node interface may have children. For example,
Text nodes may not have children, and adding children to
such nodes results in a DOMException being raised.

The attributes nodeName, nodeValue and
attributes are included as a mechanism to get at node
information without casting down to the specific derived interface. In
cases where there is no obvious mapping of these attributes for a
specific nodeType (e.g., nodeValue for an
Element or attributes for a
Comment), this returns null. Note that the
specialized interfaces may contain additional and more convenient
mechanisms to get and set the relevant information.

A bitmask indicating the relative document position of a node with
respect to another node.

If the two nodes being compared are the same node, then no
flags are set on the return.

Otherwise, the order of two nodes is determined by looking
for common containers -- containers which contain both. A node
directly contains any child nodes. A node also directly
contains any other nodes attached to it such as attributes
contained in an element or entities and notations contained in a
document type. Nodes contained in contained nodes are also
contained, but less-directly as the number of intervening
containers increases.

If there is no common container node,
then the order is based upon order between the root container of
each node that is in no container. In this case, the result is
disconnected and implementation-specific. This result is
stable as long as these outer-most containing nodes remain in
memory and are not inserted into some other containing node.
This would be the case when the nodes belong to different
documents or fragments, and cloning the document or inserting a
fragment might change the order.

If one of the nodes being compared contains the other node,
then the container precedes the contained node, and reversely the
contained node follows the container. For example, when comparing
an element against its own attribute or child, the element node
precedes its attribute node and its child node, which both follow
it.

If neither of the previous cases apply, then there exists a
most-direct container common to both nodes being compared. In
this case, the order is determined based upon the two
determining nodes directly contained in this most-direct common
container that either are or contain the corresponding nodes
being compared.

If these two determining nodes are both child nodes, then the
natural DOM order of these determining nodes within the
containing node is returned as the order of the corresponding
nodes. This would be the case, for example, when comparing two
child elements of the same element.

If one of the two determining nodes is a child node and the
other is not, then the corresponding node of the child node
follows the corresponding node of the non-child node. This
would be the case, for example, when comparing an attribute of
an element with a child element of the same element.

If neither of the two determining node is a child node and
one determining node has a greater value of
nodeType than the other, then the corresponding
node precedes the other. This would be the case, for example,
when comparing an entity of a document type against a notation
of the same document type.

If neither of the two determining node is a child node and
nodeType is the same for both determining nodes,
then an implementation-dependent order between the determining
nodes is returned. This order is stable as long as no nodes of
the same nodeType are inserted into or removed from the direct
container. This would be the case, for example, when comparing
two attributes of the same element, and inserting or removing
additional attributes might change the order between existing
attributes.

The absolute base URI of this node or null if
undefined. This value is computed according to [XML Base].
However, when the Document supports the feature "HTML"
[DOM Level 2 HTML], the base URI is computed using first the
value of the href attribute of the HTML BASE element if any, and the
value of the documentURI attribute from the
Document interface otherwise.

Returns the local part of the
qualified name of this
node.
For nodes of any type other than ELEMENT_NODE and
ATTRIBUTE_NODE and nodes created with a DOM Level 1
method, such as Document.createElement(),
this is always null.

The namespace URI of this
node, or null if it is unspecified.
This is not a computed value that is the result of a namespace lookup
based on an examination of the namespace declarations in scope. It is
merely the namespace URI given at creation time.
For nodes of any type other than ELEMENT_NODE and
ATTRIBUTE_NODE and nodes created with a DOM Level 1
method, such as Document.createElement(), this is
always null.

Note: Per the Namespaces in XML Specification
[XML Namespaces] an attribute does not inherit its
namespace from the element it is attached to. If an attribute is
not explicitly given a namespace, it simply has no namespace.

The parent of this node. All nodes,
except Attr, Document,
DocumentFragment, Entity, and
Notation may have a parent. However, if a node has just
been created and not yet added to the tree, or if it has been removed
from the tree, this is null.

The namespace prefix of
this node, or null if it is unspecified.
Note that setting this attribute, when permitted, changes the
nodeName attribute, which holds the
qualified name, as well as
the tagName and name attributes of the
Element and Attr interfaces, when
applicable.
Setting the prefix to null makes it unspecified, setting
it to an empty string is implementation dependent.
Note also that changing the prefix of an attribute that is known to
have a default value, does not make a new attribute with the default
value and the original prefix appear, since the
namespaceURI and localName do not change.
For nodes of any type other than ELEMENT_NODE and
ATTRIBUTE_NODE and nodes created with a DOM Level 1
method, such as createElement from the
Document interface, this is always null.

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified
prefix contains an illegal character according to the XML version in use
specified in the Document.xmlVersion attribute.

NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is
readonly.

NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the specified
prefix is malformed per the Namespaces in XML
specification, if the namespaceURI of this node is
null, if the specified prefix is "xml" and the
namespaceURI of this node is different from
"http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace", if this node is an attribute
and the specified prefix is "xmlns" and the
namespaceURI of this node is different from
"http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/", or if this node is an
attribute and the qualifiedName of this node is
"xmlns" [XML Namespaces].

This attribute returns the text content of this node and its
descendants. When it is defined to be null, setting it
has no effect. On setting, any possible children this node may have are
removed and, if it the new string is not empty or null,
replaced by a single Text node containing the string
this attribute is set to.
On getting, no serialization is performed, the returned string
does not contain any markup. No whitespace normalization is
performed and the returned string does not contain the white
spaces in element content (see the method
Text.isWhitespaceInElementContent()). Similarly, on
setting, no parsing is performed either, the input string is
taken as pure textual content.
The string returned is
made of the text content of this node depending on its type, as
defined below:

Returns a duplicate of this node, i.e., serves as a generic copy
constructor for nodes. The duplicate node has no parent;
(parentNode is null.) and no user data. User
data associated to the imported node is not carried over. However,
if any UserDataHandlers has been specified along with the
associated data these handlers will be called with the appropriate
parameters before this method returns.
Cloning an Element copies all attributes and their
values, including those generated by the XML processor to represent
defaulted attributes, but this method does not copy any children it
contains unless it is a deep clone. This includes text contained in an
the Element since the text is contained in a child
Text node. Cloning an Attr directly, as
opposed to be cloned as part of an Element cloning
operation, returns a specified attribute (specified is
true). Cloning an Attr always clones its
children, since they represent its value, no matter whether this is a
deep clone or not. Cloning an EntityReference
automatically constructs its subtree if a corresponding
Entity is available, no matter whether this is a deep
clone or not. Cloning any other type of node simply returns a copy of
this node.
Note that cloning an immutable subtree results in a mutable copy, but
the children of an EntityReference clone are
readonly. In addition, clones
of unspecified Attr nodes are specified. And, cloning
Document, DocumentType, Entity,
and Notation nodes is implementation dependent.

Parameters

deep of type
boolean

If true, recursively clone the subtree under the
specified node; if false, clone only the node itself
(and its attributes, if it is an Element).

This method returns a specialized object which implements the
specialized APIs of the specified feature and version, as
specified in DOM Features. The specialized object
may also be obtained by using binding-specific casting methods
but is not necessarily expected to, as discussed in Mixed DOM implementations. This method also allow the implementation
to provide specialized objects which do not support the
Node interface.

Returns an object which implements the specialized APIs of the
specified feature and version, if any, or null if
there is no object which implements interfaces associated with
that feature. If the DOMObject returned by this
method implements the Node interface, it must
delegate to the primary core Node and not return
results inconsistent with the primary core Node
such as attributes, childNodes, etc.

Inserts the node newChild before the existing child node
refChild. If refChild is null,
insert newChild at the end of the list of children.
If newChild is a DocumentFragment object,
all of its children are inserted, in the same order, before
refChild. If the newChild is already in the
tree, it is first removed.

HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: Raised if this node is of a type that does
not allow children of the type of the newChild node, or
if the node to insert is one of this node's ancestors or this node itself, or if this
node if of type Document and the DOM application
attempts to insert a second DocumentType or
Element node.

WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if newChild was created
from a different document than the one that created this node.

NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly or if
the parent of the node being inserted is readonly.

NOT_FOUND_ERR: Raised if refChild is not a child of
this node.

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: if this node if of type Document,
this exception might be raised if the DOM implementation doesn't
support the insertion of a DocumentType or
Element node.

Tests whether two nodes are equal.
This method tests for equality of nodes, not sameness (i.e., whether
the two nodes are references to the same object) which can be tested
with Node.isSameNode(). All nodes that are the same will
also be equal, though the reverse may not be true.
Two nodes are equal if and only if the following conditions are
satisfied:

The two nodes are of the same type.

The following string attributes are equal:
nodeName, localName,
namespaceURI, prefix,
nodeValue. This is: they are
both null, or they have the same length and are
character for character identical.

The attributesNamedNodeMaps are
equal. This is: they are both null, or they have the
same length and for each node that exists in one map there is a
node that exists in the other map and is equal, although not
necessarily at the same index.

The childNodesNodeLists are
equal. This is: they are both null, or they
have the same length and contain equal nodes at the same index.
Note that normalization can affect equality; to avoid this, nodes
should be normalized before being compared.

For two DocumentType nodes to be equal, the following
conditions must also be satisfied:

The following string attributes are equal:
publicId, systemId,
internalSubset.

On the other hand, the following do not affect equality:
the ownerDocument, baseURI, and
parentNode attributes, the specified
and attribute for Attr nodes, the schemaTypeInfo
attribute for Attr and Element nodes, the
Text.isWhitespaceInElementContent() method for
Text nodes, as well as any user data or event listeners
registered on the nodes.

Note:
As a general rule, anything not mentioned in the description
above is not significant in consideration of equality
checking. Note that future versions of this specification may
take into account more attributes and implementations conform
to this specification are expected to be updated accordingly.

Returns whether this node is the same node as the given one.
This method provides a way to determine whether two Node
references returned by the implementation reference the same
object. When two Node references are references to the
same object, even if through a proxy, the references may be used
completely interchangeably, such that all attributes have the same
values and calling the same DOM method on either reference always has
exactly the same effect.

Look up the prefix associated to the given namespace URI, starting
from this node. The default namespace declarations are ignored by this method.
See Namespace Prefix Lookup for details on the
algorithm used by this method.

Puts all Text nodes in the full depth of the sub-tree
underneath this Node, including attribute nodes, into a
"normal" form where only structure (e.g., elements, comments,
processing instructions, CDATA sections, and entity references)
separates Text nodes, i.e., there are neither adjacent
Text nodes nor empty Text nodes. This can be
used to ensure that the DOM view of a document is the same as if it
were saved and re-loaded, and is useful when operations (such as
XPointer [XPointer] lookups) that
depend on a particular document tree structure are to be used.

Note: In cases where the document contains CDATASections, the
normalize operation alone may not be sufficient, since XPointers do
not differentiate between Text nodes and
CDATASection nodes.

Replaces the child node oldChild with
newChild in the list of children, and returns the
oldChild node.
If newChild is a DocumentFragment object,
oldChild is replaced by all of the
DocumentFragment children, which are inserted in the same
order. If the newChild is already in the tree, it is first
removed.

Objects implementing the NamedNodeMap interface are used to
represent collections of nodes that can be accessed by name. Note that
NamedNodeMap does not inherit from NodeList;
NamedNodeMaps are not maintained in any particular
order. Objects contained in an object implementing
NamedNodeMap may also be accessed by an ordinal index, but
this is simply to allow convenient enumeration of the contents of a
NamedNodeMap, and does not imply that the DOM specifies an
order to these Nodes.

Removes a node specified by name. When this map contains the
attributes attached to an element, if the removed attribute is known to
have a default value, an attribute immediately appears containing the
default value as well as the corresponding namespace URI, local name,
and prefix when applicable.

Removes a node specified by local name and namespace URI. A removed
attribute may be known to have a default value when this map contains
the attributes attached to an element, as returned by the attributes
attribute of the Node interface. If so, an attribute
immediately appears containing the default value as well as the
corresponding namespace URI, local name, and prefix when
applicable.
Per [XML Namespaces], applications must use the value null
as the namespaceURI parameter for methods if they wish to have no
namespace.

Adds a node using its nodeName attribute. If a node with
that name is already present in this map, it is replaced by the new
one. Replacing a node by itself has no effect.
As the nodeName attribute is used to derive the name
which the node must be stored under, multiple nodes of certain types
(those that have a "special" string value) cannot be stored as the
names would clash. This is seen as preferable to allowing nodes to be
aliased.

WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if arg was created from a
different document than the one that created this map.

NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this map is readonly.

INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR: Raised if arg is an
Attr that is already an attribute of another
Element object. The DOM user must explicitly clone
Attr nodes to re-use them in other elements.

HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: Raised if an attempt is made to add a node
doesn't belong in this NamedNodeMap. Examples would include trying
to insert something other than an Attr node into an Element's map
of attributes, or a non-Entity node into the DocumentType's map of
Entities.

Adds a node using its namespaceURI and
localName. If a node with that namespace URI and that
local name is already present in this map, it is replaced by the new
one. Replacing a node by itself has no effect.
Per [XML Namespaces], applications must use the value null
as the namespaceURI parameter for methods if they wish to have no
namespace.

WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if arg was created from a
different document than the one that created this map.

NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this map is readonly.

INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR: Raised if arg is an
Attr that is already an attribute of another
Element object. The DOM user must explicitly clone
Attr nodes to re-use them in other elements.

HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: Raised if an attempt is made to add a node
doesn't belong in this NamedNodeMap. Examples would include trying
to insert something other than an Attr node into an Element's map
of attributes, or a non-Entity node into the DocumentType's map of
Entities.

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: May be raised if the implementation does
not support the feature "XML" and the language exposed
through the Document does not support XML Namespaces (such
as [HTML 4.01]).

The CharacterData interface extends Node with a set of
attributes and methods for accessing character data in the DOM. For
clarity this set is defined here rather than on each object that uses
these attributes and methods. No DOM objects correspond directly to
CharacterData, though Text and others do
inherit the interface from it. All offsets in this
interface start from 0.

As explained in the DOMString interface, text strings
in the DOM are represented in UTF-16, i.e. as a sequence of 16-bit
units. In the following, the term 16-bit
units is used whenever necessary to indicate that indexing on
CharacterData is done in 16-bit units.

The character data of the node that implements this interface. The DOM
implementation may not put arbitrary limits on the amount of data that
may be stored in a CharacterData node. However,
implementation limits may mean that the entirety of a node's data may
not fit into a single DOMString. In such cases, the user
may call substringData to retrieve the data in
appropriately sized pieces.

Replace the characters starting at the specified
16-bit unit offset with the
specified string.

Parameters

offset of type
unsigned long

The offset from which to start replacing.

count of type
unsigned long

The number of 16-bit units to replace. If the sum of
offset and count exceeds
length, then all 16-bit units to the end of the data
are replaced; (i.e., the effect is the same as a
remove method call with the same range, followed by an
append method invocation).

The Attr interface represents an attribute in an
Element object. Typically the allowable values for the
attribute are defined in a schema associated with the document.

Attr objects inherit the Node interface, but
since they are not actually child nodes of the element they describe, the
DOM does not consider them part of the document tree. Thus, the
Node attributes parentNode,
previousSibling, and nextSibling have a
null value for Attr objects. The DOM takes the
view that attributes are properties of elements rather than having a
separate identity from the elements they are associated with; this should
make it more efficient to implement such features as default attributes
associated with all elements of a given type. Furthermore,
Attr nodes may not be immediate children of a
DocumentFragment. However, they can be associated with
Element nodes contained within a
DocumentFragment. In short, users and implementors of the
DOM need to be aware that Attr nodes have some things in
common with other objects inheriting the Node interface, but
they also are quite distinct.

The attribute's effective value is determined as follows: if this
attribute has been explicitly assigned any value, that value is the
attribute's effective value; otherwise, if there is a declaration for
this attribute, and that declaration includes a default value, then that
default value is the attribute's effective value; otherwise, the
attribute does not exist on this element in the structure model until it
has been explicitly added. Note that the Node.nodeValue
attribute on the Attr instance can also be used to retrieve
the string version of the attribute's value(s).

If the attribute was not explicitly given a value in the instance
document but has a default value provided by the schema associated
with the document, an attribute node will be created with
specified set to false. Removing
attribute nodes for which a default value is defined in the schema
generates a new attribute node with the default value and
specified set to false. If validation
occurred while invoking Document.normalizeDocument(),
attribute nodes with specified equals to
false are recomputed according to the default
attribute values provided by the schema. If no default value is
associate with this attribute in the schema, the attribute node is
discarded.

In XML, where the value of an attribute can contain entity references,
the child nodes of the Attr node may be either
Text or EntityReference nodes (when these are
in use; see the description of EntityReference for
discussion).

The DOM Core represents all attribute values as simple strings,
even if the DTD or schema associated with the document declares
them of some specific type such as tokenized.

The way attribute value normalization is performed by the DOM
implementation depends on how much the implementation knows about
the schema in use. Typically, the value and
nodeValue attributes of an Attr node
initially returns the normalized value given by the parser. It is
also the case after Document.normalizeDocument() is
called (assuming the right options have been set). But this may
not be the case after mutation, independently of whether the
mutation is performed by setting the string value directly or by
changing the Attr child nodes. In particular, this is
true when character entity references are involved, given that
they are not represented in the DOM and they impact attribute
value normalization. On the other hand, if the implementation
knows about the schema in use when the attribute value is changed,
and it is of a different type than CDATA, it may normalize it
again at that time. This is especially true of specialized DOM
implementations, such as SVG DOM implementations, which store
attribute values in an internal form different from a string.

The following table gives some examples of
the relations between the attribute value in the original document
(parsed attribute), the value as exposed in the DOM, and the
serialization of the value:

The type information associated with this attribute. While the
type information contained in this attribute is guarantee to be
correct after loading the document or invoking
Document.normalizeDocument(),
schemaTypeInfo may not be reliable if the node was
moved.

True if this attribute was explicitly given a value
in the instance document, false otherwise. If the
application changed the value of this attribute node (even if it
ends up having the same value as the default value) then it is
set to true. The implementation may handle
attributes with default values from other schemas similarly but
applications should use Document.normalizeDocument()
to guarantee this information is up-to-date.

On retrieval, the value of the attribute is returned as a
string. Character and general entity references are replaced with their
values. See also the method getAttribute on the
Element interface.
On setting, this creates a Text node with the unparsed
contents of the string, i.e. any characters that an XML processor would
recognize as markup are instead treated as literal text.
See also the method Element.setAttribute().
Some specialized implementations, such as some [SVG 1.0] implementations, may do
normalization automatically, even after mutation; in such case,
the value on retrieval may differ from the value on setting.

Returns whether this attribute is known to be of type ID
(i.e. to contain an identifier for its owner element) or not.
When it is and its value is unique, the
ownerElement of this attribute can be retrieved
using the method Document.getElementById. The
implementation could use several ways to determine if an
attribute node is known to contain an identifier:

If validation occurred using a DTD while loading the document
or while invoking Document.normalizeDocument(),
the infoset [type definition] value is used to determine if this
attribute is a DTD-determined ID attribute
using the DTD-determined
ID definition in [XPointer].

Note:
An XPointer framework processing (see section 3.2 in [XPointer]) would consider the
DOM user-determined ID attribute as being part of their
externally-determined ID definition.

using mechanisms that are outside the scope of this
specification, it is then an externally-determined
ID attribute. This includes using schema
languages different from XML schema and DTD.

If validation occurred while invoking
Document.normalizeDocument(), all
user-determined ID attributes are reset and all
attribute nodes ID information are then reevaluated in
accordance to the schema used. As a consequence, if the
Attr.schemaTypeInfo attribute contains an ID type,
isId will always return true.

The Element interface represents an
element in an HTML or XML
document. Elements may have attributes associated with them; since the
Element interface inherits from Node, the
generic Node interface attribute attributes may
be used to retrieve the set of all attributes for an element. There are
methods on the Element interface to retrieve either an
Attr object by name or an attribute value by name. In XML,
where an attribute value may contain entity references, an
Attr object should be retrieved to examine the possibly
fairly complex sub-tree representing the attribute value. On the other
hand, in HTML, where all attributes have simple string values, methods to
directly access an attribute value can safely be used as a
convenience.

Note: In DOM Level 2, the method normalize is inherited from
the Node interface where it was moved.

tagName has the value "elementExample". Note
that this is case-preserving in XML, as are all of the operations of
the DOM. The HTML DOM returns the tagName of an HTML
element in the canonical uppercase form, regardless of the case in the
source HTML document.

Returns true when an attribute with a given local name
and namespace URI is specified on this element or has a default value,
false otherwise.
Per [XML Namespaces], applications must use the value null
as the namespaceURI parameter for methods if they wish to have no
namespace.

Removes an attribute by name. If a default value for the removed
attribute is defined in the DTD, a new attribute immediately appears
with the default value as well as the corresponding namespace URI,
local name, and prefix when applicable. The implementation may handle
default values from other schemas similarly but applications should use
Document.normalizeDocument() to guarantee this information is up-to-date.
If no attribute with this name is found, this method has no
effect.
To remove an attribute by local name and namespace URI, use the
removeAttributeNS method.

Removes an attribute by local name and namespace URI. If a default
value for the removed attribute is defined in the DTD, a new attribute
immediately appears with the default value as well as the corresponding
namespace URI, local name, and prefix when applicable. The
implementation may handle default values from other schemas similarly
but applications should use Document.normalizeDocument() to guarantee this
information is up-to-date.
If no attribute with this local name and namespace URI is found, this
method has no effect.
Per [XML Namespaces], applications must use the value null
as the namespaceURI parameter for methods if they wish to have no
namespace.

Removes the specified attribute node. If a default value for the
removed Attr node is defined in the DTD, a new node
immediately appears with the default value as well as the corresponding
namespace URI, local name, and prefix when applicable. The
implementation may handle default values from other schemas similarly
but applications should use Document.normalizeDocument() to guarantee this
information is up-to-date.

Adds a new attribute. If an attribute with that name is already
present in the element, its value is changed to be that of the value
parameter. This value is a simple string; it is not parsed as it is
being set. So any markup (such as syntax to be recognized as an entity
reference) is treated as literal text, and needs to be appropriately
escaped by the implementation when it is written out. In order to
assign an attribute value that contains entity references, the user
must create an Attr node plus any Text and
EntityReference nodes, build the appropriate subtree, and
use setAttributeNode to assign it as the value of an
attribute.
To set an attribute with a qualified name and namespace URI, use the
setAttributeNS method.

Adds a new attribute. If an attribute with the same local name
and namespace URI is already present on the element, its prefix is
changed to be the prefix part of the qualifiedName, and
its value is changed to be the value parameter. This value
is a simple string; it is not parsed as it is being set. So any markup
(such as syntax to be recognized as an entity reference) is treated as
literal text, and needs to be appropriately escaped by the
implementation when it is written out. In order to assign an attribute
value that contains entity references, the user must create an
Attr node plus any Text and
EntityReference nodes, build the appropriate subtree, and
use setAttributeNodeNS or setAttributeNode to
assign it as the value of an attribute.
Per [XML Namespaces], applications must use the value null
as the namespaceURI parameter for methods if they wish to have no
namespace.

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified qualified name
contains an illegal character according to the XML version in use
specified in the Document.xmlVersion attribute.

NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly.

NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the qualifiedName is
malformed per the Namespaces in XML specification, if the
qualifiedName has a prefix and the
namespaceURI is null, if the
qualifiedName has a prefix that is "xml" and the
namespaceURI is different from
"http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace", if the
qualifiedName or its prefix is "xmlns" and the
namespaceURI is different from
"http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/", or if the
namespaceURI is
"http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/" and neither the
qualifiedName nor its prefix is "xmlns".

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: May be raised if the implementation does
not support the feature "XML" and the language exposed
through the Document does not support XML Namespaces (such
as [HTML 4.01]).

Adds a new attribute node. If an attribute with that name
(nodeName) is already present in the element, it is
replaced by the new one. Replacing an attribute node by itself has no
effect.
To add a new attribute node with a qualified name and namespace URI,
use the setAttributeNodeNS method.

Adds a new attribute. If an attribute with that local name and that
namespace URI is already present in the element, it is replaced by the
new one. Replacing an attribute node by itself has no effect.
Per [XML Namespaces], applications must use the value null
as the namespaceURI parameter for methods if they wish to have no
namespace.

Declares the attribute specified by name to be of type ID,
i.e. the Attr node becomes a user-determined
ID attribute and its method Attr.isId() will
return true. Note, however, that this simply
affects the method Attr.isId() of the
Attr node and does not change any schema that may
be in use, in particular this does not affect the
Attr.schemaTypeInfo of the specified
Attr node.
To specify an attribute by local name and namespace URI, use the
setIdAttributeNS method.

Declares the attribute specified by local name and namespace URI
to be of type ID, i.e. the Attr node becomes a
user-determined ID attribute and its method
Attr.isId() will return true. Note,
however, that this simply affects the method
Attr.isId() of the Attr node and does
not change any schema that may be in use, in particular this does not
affect the Attr.schemaTypeInfo of the specified
Attr node.

Declares the attribute specified by node to be of type ID,
i.e. the Attr node becomes a user-determined
ID attribute and its method Attr.isId() will
return true. Note, however, that this simply
affects the method Attr.isId() of the
Attr node and does not change any schema that may
be in use, in particular this does not affect the
Attr.schemaTypeInfo of the specified
Attr node.

The Text interface inherits from CharacterData
and represents the textual content (termed
character data in XML) of
an Element or Attr. If there is no markup
inside an element's content, the text is contained in a single object
implementing the Text interface that is the only child of
the element. If there is markup, it is parsed into the
information items (elements,
comments, etc.) and Text nodes that form the list of
children of the element.

When a document is first made available via the DOM, there is only one
Text node for each block of text. Users may create adjacent
Text nodes that represent the contents of a given element
without any intervening markup, but should be aware that there is no way
to represent the separations between these nodes in XML or HTML, so they
will not (in general) persist between DOM editing sessions. The
Node.normalize() method merges any such
adjacent Text objects into a single node for each block of
text.

No lexical check is done on the content of a Text
node and, depending on its position in the document, some
characters must be escaped during serialization using character
references; e.g. the characters "<&" if
the textual content is part of an element or of an attribute, the
character sequence "]]>" when part of an element, the quotation
mark character " or the apostrophe character ' when part of an
attribute. If the Text node is a direct child of the
Document node, white spaces, as defined per section
2.3 of [XML 1.0], are the only characters allowed in the
content and the presence of other characters must generate a fatal
error during serialization.

Returns all text of Text nodes logically-adjacent text
nodes to this node, concatenated in document order.
For instance, in the example below wholeText on the
Text node that contains "bar" returns "barfoo", while on
the Text node that contains "foo" it returns "foo".

Returns whether this text node contains whitespace in element content,
often abusively called "ignorable whitespace". The text node is
determined to contain whitespace in element content during the
load of the document or if validation occurs while using
Document.normalizeDocument().

Substitutes the specified text for the text of the current node and
all logically-adjacent
text nodes.
This method returns the node in the hierarchy which received the
replacement text, which is null if the text was empty or is the current
node if the current node is not read-only or otherwise is a new node of
the same type as the current node inserted at the site of the
replacement. All logically-adjacent text
nodes are removed including the current node unless it was the
recipient of the replacement text.
For instance, in the above example calling
replaceWholeText on the Text node that
contains "bar" with "yo" in argument results in the following:

Breaks this node into two nodes at the specified offset,
keeping both in the tree as
siblings. After being split, this
node will contain all the content up to the offset
point. A new node of the same type, which contains all the content at
and after the offset point, is returned. If the original
node had a parent node, the new node is inserted as the next
sibling of the original node. When
the offset is equal to the length of this node, the new
node has no data.

This interface inherits from CharacterData and represents
the content of a comment, i.e., all the characters between the starting
'<!--' and ending '-->'. Note that this
is the definition of a comment in XML, and, in practice, HTML, although
some HTML tools may implement the full SGML comment structure.

No lexical check is done on the content of a comment and
it is therefore possible to have the character sequence
"--" (double-hyphen) in the content, which is illegal
in a comment per section 2.5 of [XML 1.0]. The presence
of this character sequence must generate a fatal error during
serialization.

The TypeInfo interface represent a type referenced
from Element or Attr nodes, specified in
the schemas associated with the
document. The type is a pair of a namespace URI and name properties,
and depends on the document's schema.

If the document's schema is an XML DTD [XML 1.0], the
values are computed as follows:

If this type is referenced from an Attr node,
typeNamespace is null and
typeName represents the [attribute type]
property in the [XML Information set]. If there is
no declaration for the attribute, typeName is
null.

If this type is referenced from an Element node,
the typeNamespace and typeName are
null.

If the document's schema is an XML Schema [XML Schema Part 1], the values are computed as follows using the
post-schema-validation infoset contributions (also called PSVI
contributions):

If the [validity] property exists AND is
"invalid" or "notKnown": the {target
namespace} and {name} properties of the declared type if
available, otherwise null.

Note:
At the time of writing, the XML Schema specification does
not require exposing the declared type. Thus, DOM
implementations might choose not to provide type information
if validity is not valid.

If the [validity] property exists and is "valid":

If [member type definition] exists:

If {name} is not absent, then expose {name} and {target namespace} properties of the
[member type definition] property;

When associating an object to a key on a node using
Node.setUserData() the application can provide a handler that gets
called when the node the object is associated to is being cloned,
imported, or renamed. This can be used by the application to implement
various behaviors regarding the data it associates to the DOM nodes.
This interface defines that handler.

A DOMString indicating which related data is
expected in relatedData. Users should refer to the
specification of the error in order to find its
DOMString type and relatedData
definitions if any.

Note:
As an example, Document.normalizeDocument() does
generate warnings when the "split-cdata-sections"
parameter is in use. Therefore, the method generates a
SEVERITY_WARNING with type"cdata-section-splitted" and the first
CDATASection node in document order resulting
from the split is returned by the relatedData
attribute.

DOMErrorHandler is a callback interface that the DOM
implementation can call when reporting errors that happens while
processing XML data, or when doing some other processing
(e.g. validating a document). A DOMErrorHandler
object can be attached to a Document using the
"error-handler"
on the DOMConfiguration interface. If more than one
error needs to be reported during an operation, the sequence and
numbers of the errors passed to the error handler are
implementation dependent.

The application that is using the DOM implementation is expected
to implement this interface.

The error object that describes the error. This object may
be reused by the DOM implementation across multiple calls to
the handleError method.

Return Value

boolean

If the handleError method returns
true, the DOM implementation should continue as if
the error didn't happen when possible, if the method returns
false then the DOM implementation should stop the
current processing when possible.

The byte or character offset into the input source this locator is
pointing to. If the input source is a file or a byte stream then this
is the byte offset into that stream, but if the input source is a
character media then the offset is the character offset. The value is
-1 if there is no offset available.

The DOMConfiguration interface represents the
configuration of a document and maintains a table of recognized
parameters. Using the configuration, it is possible to change
Document.normalizeDocument() behavior, such as
replacing the CDATASection nodes with
Text nodes or specifying the type of the schema that must be used when the
validation of the Document is
requested. DOMConfiguration objects are also used in
[DOM Level 3 Load and Save] in the
DOMParser and DOMSerializer interfaces.

The parameter names used by the DOMConfiguration
object are defined throughout the DOM Level 3
specifications. Names are case-insensitives. To avoid possible
conflicts, as a convention, names referring to parameters defined
outside the DOM specification should be made unique. Because
parameters are exposed as properties in the ECMAScript Language Binding, names are recommended to follow the section
"5.16 Identifiers" of [Unicode] with the addition of the character '-'
(HYPHEN-MINUS) but it is not enforced by the DOM
implementation. DOM Level 3 Core Implementations are required to
recognize all parameters defined in this specification. Some
parameter values may also be required to be supported by
the implementation. Refer to the definition of the parameter to
know if a value must be supported or not.

Note:
Parameters are similar to features and properties used in SAX2
[SAX].

[optional]
Canonicalize the document according to the rules specified
in [Canonical XML]. Note that this
is limited to what can be represented in the DOM. In
particular, there is no way to specify the order of the
attributes in the DOM.
This forces the following parameters to
false:
"entities",
"normalize-characters",
"cdata-sections".
This forces the following parameters to
true:
"namespaces",
"namespace-declarations",
"well-formed",
"whitespace-in-element-content".
Other parameters are not changed unless explicitly specified
in the description of the parameters.
In addition, the DocumentType node is
removed from the tree if any and superfluous namespace
declarations are removed from each element.
Note that querying this parameter with
getParameter cannot return
true unless it has been set to
true and the parameters described above are
appropriately set.

[optional]
Check if the characters in the document are fully
normalized according to the rules defined in [CharModel] supplemented by the definitions of
relevant constructs from Section 2.13 of
[XML 1.1].

[required]
Exposed schema-normalized values in the tree. Since
this parameter requires to have schema information, the
"validate"
parameter will also be set to
true. Having this parameter activated
when "validate" is false has no effect
and no schema-normalization will happen.

Note:
Since the document contains the result of the XML
1.0 processing, this parameter does not apply to
attribute value normalization as defined in section
3.3.3 of [XML 1.0] and is only meant for
schema languages
other than Document Type Definition (DTD).

[required]
Remove all EntityReference and
Entity nodes from the document, putting
the entity expansions directly in their place.
Text nodes are normalized, as defined in
Node.normalize. Only
EntityReference nodes to non-defined
entities are kept in the document, with their
associated Entity nodes if any.

[required]
Contains a DOMErrorHandler object. If an error
is encountered in the document, the implementation will call
back the DOMErrorHandler registered using this
parameter.
When called, DOMError.relatedData will contain
the closest node to where the error occurred. If the
implementation is unable to determine the node where the
error occurs, DOMError.relatedData will contain
the Document node. Mutations to the document
from within an error handler will result in implementation
dependent behavior.

[required] (default)
Include namespace declaration attributes, specified or
defaulted from the schema, in the document. See
also the sections "Declaring Namespaces" in [XML Namespaces] and [XML Namespaces 1.1].

false

[required]
Discard all namespace declaration attributes. The
namespace prefixes (Node.prefix) are
retained even if this parameter is set
to false.

[optional]
Represent a DOMString object containing a list
of URIs, separated by whitespaces (characters matching the
nonterminal production
S defined in section 2.3 [XML 1.0]),
that represents the schemas against which validation
should occur, i.e. the current schema. The types of schemas
referenced in this list must match the type specified with
schema-type, otherwise the behavior of an
implementation is undefined.
The schemas specified using this property take precedence to
the schema information specified in the document itself. For
namespace aware schema, if a schema specified using this
property and a schema specified in the document instance
(i.e. using the schemaLocation attribute) in a
schema document (i.e. using schema import
mechanisms) share the same targetNamespace, the
schema specified by the user using this property will be
used. If two schemas specified using this property share the
same targetNamespace or have no namespace, the
behavior is implementation dependent.
If no location has been provided, this parameter is
null.

Note:
It is illegal to set the "schema-location"
parameter if the "schema-type"
parameter value is not set. It is strongly recommended
that Document.documentURI will be set so that
an implementation can successfully resolve any external
entities referenced.

[optional]
Represent a DOMString object containing an
absolute URI and representing the type of the schema language used to validate a
document against. Note that no lexical checking is done on
the absolute URI.
If this parameter is not set, a default value may be
provided by the implementation, based on the schema
languages supported and on the schema language used at load
time. If no value is provided, this parameter is
null.

Note:
For XML Schema [XML Schema Part 1], applications
must use the value
"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema". For XML
DTD [XML 1.0], applications must use the value
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml". Other schema
languages are outside the scope of the W3C and therefore
should recommend an absolute URI in order to use this
method.

[required] (default)
Split CDATA sections containing the CDATA section
termination marker ']]>'. When a CDATA section is split
a warning is issued with a
DOMError.type equals to
"cdata-sections-splitted" and
DOMError.relatedData equals to the first
CDATASection node in document order
resulting from the split.

false

[required]
Signal an error if a CDATASection contains
an unrepresentable character.

[optional]
Require the validation against a schema (i.e. XML schema,
DTD, any other type or representation of schema) of
the document as it is being normalized as defined by
[XML 1.0]. If validation errors are found,
or no schema was found, the error handler is
notified. Schema-normalized values will not be exposed
according to the schema in used unless the parameter
"datatype-normalization"
is true.
This parameter will reevaluate:

Attribute nodes with Attr.specified
equals to false, as specified in the
description of the Attr interface;

Note:
"validate-if-schema"
and "validate" are mutually exclusive,
setting one of them to true will set
the other one to false. Applications
should also consider setting the parameter
"well-formed" to true,
which is the default for that option, when
validating the document.

false

[required] (default)
Do not accomplish schema processing, including the
internal subset processing. Note that validation might
still happen if ""validate-if-schema"
is true.

[optional]
Enable validation only if a declaration for the
document element can be found in a schema (independently of where
it is found, i.e. XML schema, DTD, or any other type
or representation of schema). If validation is
enabled, this parameter has the same behavior as the
parameter "validate" set to
true.

Note:
"validate-if-schema" and
"validate" are mutually exclusive,
setting one of them to true will
set the other one to false.

false

[required] (default)
No schema processing should be performed if the
document has a schema, including internal subset
processing. Note that validation must still happen if
"validate"
is true.

[optional]
Discard all Text nodes that contain
whitespaces in element content. The implementation
is expected to use the method
Text.isWhitespaceInElementContent to
determine if a Text node should be
discarded or not.

true if the parameter could be successfully set
to the specified value, or false if the parameter
is not recognized or the requested value is not
supported. This does not change the current value of the
parameter itself.

The new value or null if the user wishes to
unset the parameter. While the type of the value parameter
is defined as DOMUserData, the object type must
match the type defined by the definition of the
parameter. For example, if the parameter is "error-handler", the
value must be of type DOMErrorHandler.

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: Raised when the parameter name is
recognized but the requested value cannot be set.

TYPE_MISMATCH_ERR: Raised if the value type for this
parameter name is incompatible with the expected value type.

No Return Value

1.5
Extended Interfaces: XML module

The interfaces defined here form part of the DOM Core specification, but
objects that expose these interfaces will never be encountered in a DOM
implementation that deals only with HTML.

The interfaces found within this section are not mandatory. A DOM
application may use the
DOMImplementation.hasFeature(feature, version) method
with parameter values "XML" and "3.0" (respectively) to determine
whether or not this module is supported by the implementation. In
order to fully support this module, an implementation must also
support the "Core" feature defined in Fundamental Interfaces: Core module. Please refer to additional information about
Conformance in this specification. The DOM
Level 3 XML module is backward compatible with the DOM Level 2 XML
[DOM Level 2 Core] and DOM Level 1 XML
[DOM Level 1] modules, i.e. a DOM
Level 3 XML implementation who returns true for "XML"
with the version number "3.0" must also
return true for this feature when the
version number is "2.0",
"1.0", "" or, null.

CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters
that would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is
recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]>" string that ends the CDATA
section. CDATA sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for
including material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all
the delimiters.

The DOMString attribute of the
Text node holds the text that is contained by the CDATA
section. Note that this may contain characters that need to
be escaped outside of CDATA sections and that, depending on the character
encoding ("charset") chosen for serialization, it may be impossible to
write out some characters as part of a CDATA section.

The CDATASection interface inherits from the
CharacterData interface through the Text
interface. Adjacent CDATASection nodes are not merged by use
of the normalize method of the Node
interface.

No lexical check is done on the content of a CDATA section and it
is therefore possible to have the character sequence
"]]>" in the content, which is illegal in a CDATA
section per section 2.7 of [XML 1.0]. The presence of
this character sequence must generate a fatal error during
serialization or the cdata section must be splitted before the
serialization (see also the parameter
"split-cdata-sections" in the
DOMConfiguration interface).

Note: Because no markup is recognized within a CDATASection,
character numeric references cannot be used as an escape mechanism
when serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken when serializing
a CDATASection with a character encoding where some of
the contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to do so would
not produce well-formed XML.
One potential solution in the serialization process is to end the
CDATA section before the character, output the character using a
character reference or entity reference, and open a new CDATA section
for any further characters in the text node. Note, however, that some
code conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return an
error or exception when a character is missing from the encoding,
making the task of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization
more difficult.

Each Document has a doctype attribute whose
value is either null or a DocumentType
object. The DocumentType interface in the DOM Core provides
an interface to the list of entities that are defined for the document,
and little else because the effect of namespaces and the various XML
schema efforts on DTD representation are not clearly understood as of
this writing.

the interface provides access to foo and the first
declaration of bar but not the second declaration of
bar or baz. Every node in this map also
implements the Entity interface.
The DOM Level 2 does not support editing entities, therefore
entities cannot be altered in any way.

The internal subset as a string, or null if there is
none. This is does not contain the delimiting square brackets.

Note: The actual content returned depends on how much information is
available to the implementation. This may vary depending on various
parameters, including the XML processor used to build the
document.

A NamedNodeMap containing the notations declared in the
DTD. Duplicates are discarded. Every node in this map also implements
the Notation interface.
The DOM Level 2 does not support editing notations, therefore
notations cannot be altered in any way.

This interface represents a notation declared in the DTD. A notation
either declares, by name, the format of an unparsed entity (see section 4.7
of the XML 1.0 specification [XML 1.0]), or is used for formal
declaration of
processing instruction targets (see section 2.6 of the XML 1.0
specification [XML 1.0]). The nodeName attribute
inherited from
Node is set to the declared name of the notation.

The DOM Core does not support editing Notation
nodes; they are therefore
readonly.

This interface represents a known entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an
XML document. Note that this models the entity itself not
the entity declaration.

The nodeName attribute that is inherited from
Node contains the name of the entity.

An XML processor may choose to completely expand entities before the
structure model is passed to the DOM; in this case there will be no
EntityReference nodes in the document tree.

XML does not mandate that a non-validating XML processor read and
process entity declarations made in the external subset or declared in
external parameter entities. This means that parsed entities declared in
the external subset need not be expanded by some classes of applications,
and that the replacement text of the entity may not be available. When the
replacement text is
available, the corresponding Entity node's child list
represents the structure of that replacement value. Otherwise, the child
list is empty.

The DOM Level 2 does not support editing Entity nodes; if a
user wants to make changes to the contents of an Entity,
every related EntityReference node has to be replaced in the
structure model by a clone of the Entity's contents, and
then the desired changes must be made to each of those clones
instead. Entity nodes and all their
descendants are
readonly.

An Entity node does not have any parent.

Note: If the entity contains an unbound
namespace prefix, the
namespaceURI of the corresponding node in the
Entity node subtree is null. The same is
true for EntityReference nodes that refer to this entity,
when they are created using the createEntityReference
method of the Document interface. The DOM Level 2 does not
support any mechanism to resolve namespace prefixes.

EntityReference nodes may be used to represent an entity
reference in the tree. Note that character references
and references to predefined entities are considered to be expanded by
the HTML or XML processor so that characters are represented by their
Unicode equivalent rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML
processor may completely expand references to entities while building the
Document, instead of providing EntityReference
nodes. If it does provide such nodes, then for an
EntityReference node that represents a reference to a known
entity an Entity exists, and the subtree of the
EntityReference node is a copy of the
Entity node subtree. However, the latter may not be true
when an entity contains an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the namespace prefix
resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the
descendants of the
EntityReference node may be bound to different
namespace URIs. When an
EntityReference node represents a reference to an unknown
entity, its content is empty.

Note:EntityReference nodes may cause element content and
attribute value normalization problems when, such as in XML 1.0 and
XML Schema, the normalization is be performed after entity reference
are expanded.

The ProcessingInstruction interface represents a
"processing instruction", used in XML as a way to keep
processor-specific information in the text of the document.

No lexical check is done on the content of a processing
instruction and it is therefore possible to have the character
sequence "?>" in the content, which is illegal a
processing instruction per section 2.6 of [XML 1.0]. The
presence of this character sequence must generate a fatal error
during serialization.

The DOMImplementationRegistry object, only
provided in the bindings, has two methods,
DOMImplementationRegistry.getDOMImplementation(features),
and
DOMImplementationRegistry.getDOMImplementations(features).

B.1 Namespace normalization

Namespace declaration attributes and prefixes are normalized as
part of the normalizeDocument method of the
Document interface as if the following method
described in pseudo code was called on the document element.

void Element.normalizeNamespaces()
{
// Pick up local namespace declarations
//
for ( all DOM Level 2 valid local namespace declaration attributes of Element )
{
if (the namespace declaration is invalid)
{
// Note: The prefix xmlns is used only to declare namespace bindings and
// is by definition bound to the namespace name http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/.
// It must not be declared. No other prefix may be bound to this namespace name.
==> Report an error.
}
else
{
==> Record the namespace declaration
}
}
// Fixup element's namespace
//
if ( Element's namespaceURI != null )
{
if ( Element's prefix/namespace pair (or default namespace,
if no prefix) are within the scope of a binding )
{
==> do nothing, declaration in scope is inherited
See section "B.1.1: Scope of a binding" for an example
}
else
{
==> Create a local namespace declaration attr for this namespace,
with Element's current prefix (or a default namespace, if
no prefix). If there's a conflicting local declaration
already present, change its value to use this namespace.
See section "B.1.2: Conflicting namespace declaration" for an example
// NOTE that this may break other nodes within this Element's
// subtree, if they're already using this prefix.
// They will be repaired when we reach them.
}
}
else
{
// Element has no namespace URI:
if ( Element's localName is null )
{
// DOM Level 1 node
==> if in process of validation against a namespace aware schema
(i.e XML Schema) report a fatal error: the processor can not recover
in this situation.
Otherwise, report an error: no namespace fixup will be performed on this node.
}
else
{
// Element has no namespace URI
// Element has no pseudo-prefix
if ( default Namespace in scope is "no namespace" )
{
==> do nothing, we're fine as we stand
}
else
{
if ( there's a conflicting local default namespace declaration
already present )
{
==> change its value to use this empty namespace.
}
else
{
==> Set the default namespace to "no namespace" by creating or
changing a local declaration attribute: xmlns="".
}
// NOTE that this may break other nodes within this Element's
// subtree, if they're already using the default namespaces.
// They will be repaired when we reach them.
}
}
}
// Examine and polish the attributes
//
for ( all non-namespace Attrs of Element )
{
if ( Attr[i] has a namespace URI )
{
if ( attribute has no prefix (default namespace decl does not apply to attributes)
OR
attribute prefix is not declared
OR
conflict: attribute has a prefix that conflicts with a binding
already active in scope)
{
if (namespaceURI matches an in scope declaration of one or more prefixes)
{
// pick the most local binding available;
// if there is more than one pick one arbitrarily
==> change attribute's prefix.
}
else
{
if (the current prefix is not null and it has no in scope declaration)
{
==> declare this prefix
}
else
{
// find a prefix following the pattern "NS" +index (starting at 1)
// make sure this prefix is not declared in the current scope.
// create a local namespace declaration attribute
==> change attribute's prefix.
}
}
}
}
else
{
// Attr[i] has no namespace URI
if ( Attr[i] has no localName )
{
// DOM Level 1 node
==> if in process of validation against a namespace aware schema
(i.e XML Schema) report a fatal error: the processor can not recover
in this situation.
Otherwise, report an error: no namespace fixup will be performed on this node.
}
else
{
// attr has no namespace URI and no prefix
// no action is required, since attrs don't use default
==> do nothing
}
}
} // end for-all-Attrs
// do this recursively
for ( all child elements of Element )
{
childElement.normalizeNamespaces()
}
} // end Element.normalizeNamespaces

B.1.1 Scope of a binding

Note:
This section is informative.

An element is said to be within the scope of a binding if its
namespace prefix is bound to the same namespace URI in the
[in-scope namespaces] defined in [XML Information set].

In the case of the child1 element, the namespace
prefix and namespace URI are within the scope of the appropriate
namespace declaration given that the namespace prefix
ns of child1 is bound to
http://www.example.org/ns2.

Using the method Node.appendChild, a
child2 element is added as a sibling of
child1 with the same namespace prefix and namespace
URI, i.e. "ns" and
"http://www.example.org/ns2" respectively. Unlike
child1 which contains the appropriate namespace
declaration in its attributes, child2 is within the
scope of the namespace declaration of its parent, and the
namespace prefix "ns" is bound to
"http://www.example.org/ns1". child2
is therefore not within the scope of a binding. In order to put
child2 within a scope of a binding, the namespace
normalization algorithm will create a namespace declaration
attribute value to bind the namespace prefix "ns"
to the namespace URI "http://www.example.org/ns2"
and will attach to child2. The XML representation
of the document after the completion of the namespace
normalization algorithm will be:

To determine if an element is within the scope of a binding, one
can invoke Node.lookupNamespaceURI, using its
namespace prefix as the parameter, and compare the resulting
namespace URI against the desired URI, or one can invoke
Node.isDefaultNamespaceURI using its namespace URI
if the element has no namespace prefix.

B.1.2 Conflicting namespace declaration

Note:
This section is informative.

A conflicting namespace declaration could occur on an element if
an Element node and a namespace declaration
attribute use the same prefix but map them to two different
namespace URIs.

Using the method Node.renameNode, the namespace URI
of the element child1 is renamed from
"http://www.example.org/ns1" to
"http://www.example.org/ns2". The namespace prefix
"ns" is now mapped to two different namespace URIs
at the element child1 level and thus the namespace
declaration is declared conflicting. The namespace normalization
algorithm will resolved the namespace prefix conflict by
modifying the namespace declaration attribute value from
"http://www.example.org/ns1" to
"http://www.example.org/ns2". The algorithm will
then continue and consider the element child2, will
no longer find a namespace declaration mapping the namespace
prefix "ns" to
"http://www.example.org/ns1" in the element's
scope, and will create a new one. The XML representation of the
document after the completion of the namespace normalization
algorithm will be:

B.2 Namespace Prefix Lookup

The following describes in pseudo code the algorithm used in the
lookupPrefix method of the Node
interface. Before returning found prefix the algorithm needs to
make sure that the prefix is not redefined on an element from
which the lookup started. This methods ignores DOM Level 1
nodes.

Appendix E: Accessing code point boundaries

Table of contents

E.1 Introduction

This appendix is an informative, not a normative, part of the Level 2 DOM
specification.

Characters are represented in Unicode by numbers called code
points (also called scalar values). These numbers can range
from 0 up to 1,114,111 = 10FFFF16 (although some of these values are
illegal). Each code point can be directly encoded with a 32-bit code unit.
This encoding is termed UCS-4 (or UTF-32).
The DOM specification, however, uses UTF-16, in which the most frequent
characters (which have values less than FFFF16) are represented
by a single 16-bit code unit, while characters above FFFF16
use a special pair of code units called a surrogate pair. For more information,
see [Unicode] or the Unicode Web site.

While indexing by code points as opposed to code units is not
common in programs, some specifications such as [XPath 1.0] (and therefore XSLT and [XPointer]) use code point indices. For
interfacing with such formats it is recommended that the
programming language provide string processing methods for
converting code point indices to code unit indices and back. Some
languages do not provide these functions natively; for these it is
recommended that the native String type that is bound
to DOMString be extended to enable this
conversion. An example of how such an API might look is supplied
below.

Note:
Since these methods are supplied as an illustrative example of the type
of functionality that is required, the names of the methods,
exceptions, and interface may differ from those given here.

Returns the UTF-16 offset that corresponds to a UTF-32 offset.
Used for random access.

Note:
You can always round-trip from a UTF-32 offset to a UTF-16
offset and back. You can round-trip from a UTF-16 offset to
a UTF-32 offset and back if and only if the offset16 is not
in the middle of a surrogate pair. Unmatched surrogates
count as a single UTF-16 value.

Returns the UTF-32 offset corresponding to a UTF-16 offset. Used
for random access. To find the UTF-32 length of a string, use:

len32 = findOffset32(source, source.length());

Note:
If the UTF-16 offset is into the middle of a surrogate pair,
then the UTF-32 offset of the end of the pair is
returned; that is, the index of the char after the end of the
pair. You can always round-trip from a UTF-32 offset to a UTF-16
offset and back. You can round-trip from a UTF-16 offset to a
UTF-32 offset and back if and only if the offset16 is not in
the middle of a surrogate pair. Unmatched surrogates count as a
single UTF-16 value.

This appendix contains the mappings between the XML Information Set
[XML Information set] model and the Document Object Model.
Starting from a Document node, each information
item is mapped to its respective Node, and each
Node is mapped to its respective information
item. As used in the Infoset specification, the Infoset
property names are shown in square brackets, [thus].

Unless specified, the Infoset to DOM node mapping makes no
distinction between unknown and no value since both will be exposed
as null.

C.1 Document node mapping

C.1.1 Infoset to Document node

An document information item maps to a
Document node. The attributes of the corresponding
Document node are constructed as follows:

Note:
The [all declarations processed] property is not exposed through
the Document node.

C.1.2 Document node to Infoset

A Document node maps to an document
information item. Document nodes with no
namespace URI (Node.namespaceURI equals to
null) cannot be represented using the Infoset. The
properties of the corresponding document information
item are constructed as follows:

If the [prefix] property has no value, this contains the
[local name] property. Otherwise, this contains the
concatenation of the [prefix] property, the colon ':'
character, and the [local name] property.

Note:
The [in-scope namespaces] property is not exposed through the
Element node.

C.2.2 Element node to Infoset

An Element node maps to an element
information item. Element nodes with no
namespace URI (Node.namespaceURI equals to
null) cannot be represented using the
Infoset. Because the Infoset only represents unexpanded entity
references, non-empty EntityReference nodes
contained in Node.childNodes need to be replaced by
their content. DOM applications could use the
Document.normalizeDocument() method for that effect
with the "entities"
parameter set to false. The properties of the
corresponding element information item are
constructed as follows:

The namespace information items computed using the
[namespace attributes] properties of this node and
its ancestors. If the [DOM Level 3 XPath] module is supported, the namespace
information items can also be computed from the
XPathNamespace nodes.

If the [prefix] property has no value, this contains the
[local name] property. Otherwise, this contains the
concatenation of the [prefix] property, the colon ':'
character, and the [local name] property.

C.3.2 Attr node to Infoset

An Attr node maps to an attribute information
item. Attr nodes with no namespace URI
(Node.namespaceURI equals to null)
cannot be represented using the Infoset. The properties of the
corresponding attribute information item are
constructed as follows:

if the computed [attribute type] property is IDREF,
IDREFS, ENTITY, ENTITIES, or NOTATION, the value of this
property is an ordered list of the element, unparsed
entity, or notation information items referred to in the
attribute value, in the order that they appear there. The
ordered list is computed using
Document.getElementById,
DocumentType.entities, and
DocumentType.notations.

Note:
The [system identifier] and [public identifier] properties are
not exposed through the EntityReference node.

C.5.2 EntityReference node to Infoset

An EntityReference node maps to an unexpanded
entity reference information
item. EntityReference nodes with children
(Node.childNodes contains a non-empty list) cannot
be represented using the Infoset. The properties of the
corresponding unexpanded entity reference information
item are constructed as follows:

Note:
By construction, the values of the [parent] and [element
content whitespace] properties are necessarily the sames for
all consecutive character information items.

C.6.2 Text and CDATASection nodes to Infoset

The text content of a Text or a
CDATASections node maps to a sequence of
character information items. The number of items is
less or equal to CharacterData.length. Text nodes
contained in Attr nodes are mapped to the Infoset
using the Attr.value attribute. Text nodes
contained in Document nodes cannot be represented
using the Infoset. The properties of the corresponding
character information items are constructed as
follows:

C.9.2 Entity node to Infoset

An Entity node maps to an unparsed entity
information item. Entity nodes with children
(Node.childNodes contains a non-empty list) cannot
be represented using the Infoset. The properties of the
corresponding unparsed entity information item are
constructed as follows:

G.1 Java Binding Extension

Note:
This section is informative.

This section defines the DOMImplementationRegistry object,
discussed in Bootstrapping, for Java.

The DOMImplementationRegistry is first initialized by the
application or the implementation, depending on the context, through the
Java system property "org.w3c.dom.DOMImplementationSourceList". The value
of this property is a space separated list of names of available classes
implementing the DOMImplementationSource interface.

G.2 Other Core interfaces

org/w3c/dom/DOMException.java:

package org.w3c.dom;
public class DOMException extends RuntimeException {
public DOMException(short code, String message) {
super(message);
this.code = code;
}
public short code;
// ExceptionCode
public static final short INDEX_SIZE_ERR = 1;
public static final short DOMSTRING_SIZE_ERR = 2;
public static final short HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR = 3;
public static final short WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR = 4;
public static final short INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR = 5;
public static final short NO_DATA_ALLOWED_ERR = 6;
public static final short NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR = 7;
public static final short NOT_FOUND_ERR = 8;
public static final short NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR = 9;
public static final short INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR = 10;
public static final short INVALID_STATE_ERR = 11;
public static final short SYNTAX_ERR = 12;
public static final short INVALID_MODIFICATION_ERR = 13;
public static final short NAMESPACE_ERR = 14;
public static final short INVALID_ACCESS_ERR = 15;
public static final short VALIDATION_ERR = 16;
public static final short TYPE_MISMATCH_ERR = 17;
}

org/w3c/dom/DOMError.java:

package org.w3c.dom;
public interface DOMError {
// ErrorSeverity
public static final short SEVERITY_WARNING = 0;
public static final short SEVERITY_ERROR = 1;
public static final short SEVERITY_FATAL_ERROR = 2;
public short getSeverity();
public String getMessage();
public String getType();
public Object getRelatedException();
public Object getRelatedData();
public DOMLocator getLocation();
}

Appendix H: ECMAScript Language Binding

H.1 ECMAScript Binding Extension

This section defines the DOMImplementationRegistry object,
discussed in Bootstrapping, for ECMAScript.

Objects that implements the DOMImplementationRegistry
interface

DOMImplementationRegistry is a global variable
which has the following functions:

getDOMImplementation(features)

This method returns the first registered object that
implements the DOMImplementation interface and
has the desired features, or null if none is
found.
The features parameter is a
String.

sources

This property is an Array. It contains all
registered objects that implement the
DOMImplementationSource interface.

H.2 Other Core interfaces

Properties of the DOMException Constructor function:

DOMException.INDEX_SIZE_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.INDEX_SIZE_ERR is 1.

DOMException.DOMSTRING_SIZE_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.DOMSTRING_SIZE_ERR is 2.

DOMException.HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR is 3.

DOMException.WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR is 4.

DOMException.INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR is 5.

DOMException.NO_DATA_ALLOWED_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.NO_DATA_ALLOWED_ERR is 6.

DOMException.NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR is 7.

DOMException.NOT_FOUND_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.NOT_FOUND_ERR is 8.

DOMException.NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR is 9.

DOMException.INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR is 10.

DOMException.INVALID_STATE_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.INVALID_STATE_ERR is 11.

DOMException.SYNTAX_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.SYNTAX_ERR is 12.

DOMException.INVALID_MODIFICATION_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.INVALID_MODIFICATION_ERR is 13.

DOMException.NAMESPACE_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.NAMESPACE_ERR is 14.

DOMException.INVALID_ACCESS_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.INVALID_ACCESS_ERR is 15.

DOMException.VALIDATION_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.VALIDATION_ERR is 16.

DOMException.TYPE_MISMATCH_ERR

The value of the constant DOMException.TYPE_MISMATCH_ERR is 17.

Objects that implement the DOMException interface:

Properties of objects that implement the DOMException interface:

code

This property is
a Number.

Objects that implement the DOMStringList interface:

Properties of objects that implement the DOMStringList interface:

length

This read-only property is a Number.

Functions of objects that implement the DOMStringList interface:

item(index)

This function returns a String.The index parameter is a Number.
Note: This object can also be dereferenced using square bracket notation (e.g. obj[1]). Dereferencing with an integer index is equivalent to invoking the item function with that index.

Objects that implement the NameList interface:

Properties of objects that implement the NameList interface:

length

This read-only property is a Number.

Functions of objects that implement the NameList interface:

getName(index)

This function returns a String.The index parameter is a Number.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getNamespaceURI(index)

This function returns a String.The index parameter is a Number.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

Objects that implement the DOMImplementationList interface:

Properties of objects that implement the DOMImplementationList interface:

length

This read-only property is a Number.

Functions of objects that implement the DOMImplementationList interface:

item(index)

This function returns an object that implements the DOMImplementation interface.The index parameter is a Number.
Note: This object can also be dereferenced using square bracket notation (e.g. obj[1]). Dereferencing with an integer index is equivalent to invoking the item function with that index.

Objects that implement the DOMImplementationSource interface:

Functions of objects that implement the DOMImplementationSource interface:

getDOMImplementation(features)

This function returns an object that implements the DOMImplementation interface.The features parameter is a String.

getDOMImplementations(features)

This function returns an object that implements the DOMImplementationList interface.The features parameter is a String.

Objects that implement the DOMImplementation interface:

Functions of objects that implement the DOMImplementation interface:

hasFeature(feature, version)

This function returns a Boolean.The feature parameter is a String.
The version parameter is a String.

createDocumentType(qualifiedName, publicId, systemId)

This function returns an object that implements the DocumentType interface.The qualifiedName parameter is a String.
The publicId parameter is a String.
The systemId parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

createDocument(namespaceURI, qualifiedName, doctype)

This function returns an object that implements the Document interface.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The qualifiedName parameter is a String.
The doctype parameter is an object that implements the DocumentType interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getFeature(feature, version)

This function returns an object that implements the Object interface.The feature parameter is a String.
The version parameter is a String.

Objects that implement the DocumentFragment interface:

Objects that implement the DocumentFragment interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface.

Objects that implement the Document interface:

Objects that implement the Document interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the Document interface:

doctype

This read-only property is an object that implements the DocumentType interface.

implementation

This read-only property is an object that implements the DOMImplementation interface.

documentElement

This read-only property is an object that implements the Element interface.

actualEncoding

This read-only property is a String.

xmlEncoding

This property is a String.

xmlStandalone

This property is a Boolean and can raise an object that implements DOMException interface on setting.

xmlVersion

This property is a String and can raise an object that implements DOMException interface on setting.

strictErrorChecking

This property is a Boolean.

documentURI

This property is a String.

config

This read-only property is an object that implements the DOMConfiguration interface.

Functions of objects that implement the Document interface:

createElement(tagName)

This function returns an object that implements the Element interface.The tagName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

createDocumentFragment()

This function returns an object that implements the DocumentFragment interface.

createTextNode(data)

This function returns an object that implements the Text interface.The data parameter is a String.

createComment(data)

This function returns an object that implements the Comment interface.The data parameter is a String.

createCDATASection(data)

This function returns an object that implements the CDATASection interface.The data parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

createProcessingInstruction(target, data)

This function returns an object that implements the ProcessingInstruction interface.The target parameter is a String.
The data parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

createAttribute(name)

This function returns an object that implements the Attr interface.The name parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

createEntityReference(name)

This function returns an object that implements the EntityReference interface.The name parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getElementsByTagName(tagname)

This function returns an object that implements the NodeList interface.The tagname parameter is a String.

importNode(importedNode, deep)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The importedNode parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
The deep parameter is a Boolean.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

createElementNS(namespaceURI, qualifiedName)

This function returns an object that implements the Element interface.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The qualifiedName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

createAttributeNS(namespaceURI, qualifiedName)

This function returns an object that implements the Attr interface.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The qualifiedName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getElementsByTagNameNS(namespaceURI, localName)

This function returns an object that implements the NodeList interface.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.

getElementById(elementId)

This function returns an object that implements the Element interface.The elementId parameter is a String.

adoptNode(source)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The source parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

normalizeDocument()

This function has no return value.

renameNode(n, namespaceURI, qualifiedName)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The n parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The qualifiedName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

Properties of the Node Constructor function:

Node.ELEMENT_NODE

The value of the constant Node.ELEMENT_NODE is 1.

Node.ATTRIBUTE_NODE

The value of the constant Node.ATTRIBUTE_NODE is 2.

Node.TEXT_NODE

The value of the constant Node.TEXT_NODE is 3.

Node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE

The value of the constant Node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE is 4.

Node.ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE

The value of the constant Node.ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE is 5.

Node.ENTITY_NODE

The value of the constant Node.ENTITY_NODE is 6.

Node.PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE

The value of the constant Node.PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE is 7.

Node.COMMENT_NODE

The value of the constant Node.COMMENT_NODE is 8.

Node.DOCUMENT_NODE

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_NODE is 9.

Node.DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE is 10.

Node.DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE is 11.

Node.NOTATION_NODE

The value of the constant Node.NOTATION_NODE is 12.

Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_DISCONNECTED

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_DISCONNECTED is 0x01.

Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_PRECEDING

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_PRECEDING is 0x02.

Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_FOLLOWING

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_FOLLOWING is 0x04.

Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_CONTAINS

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_CONTAINS is 0x08.

Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_CONTAINED_BY

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_CONTAINED_BY is 0x10.

Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_IMPLEMENTATION_SPECIFIC

The value of the constant Node.DOCUMENT_POSITION_IMPLEMENTATION_SPECIFIC is 0x20.

Objects that implement the Node interface:

Properties of objects that implement the Node interface:

nodeName

This read-only property is a String.

nodeValue

This property is a String, can raise an object that implements DOMException interface on setting and can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface on retrieval.

nodeType

This read-only property is a Number.

parentNode

This read-only property is an object that implements the Node interface.

childNodes

This read-only property is an object that implements the NodeList interface.

firstChild

This read-only property is an object that implements the Node interface.

lastChild

This read-only property is an object that implements the Node interface.

previousSibling

This read-only property is an object that implements the Node interface.

nextSibling

This read-only property is an object that implements the Node interface.

attributes

This read-only property is an object that implements the NamedNodeMap interface.

ownerDocument

This read-only property is an object that implements the Document interface.

namespaceURI

This read-only property is a String.

prefix

This property is a String and can raise an object that implements DOMException interface on setting.

localName

This read-only property is a String.

baseURI

This read-only property is a String.

textContent

This property is a String, can raise an object that implements DOMException interface on setting and can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface on retrieval.

Functions of objects that implement the Node interface:

insertBefore(newChild, refChild)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The newChild parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
The refChild parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

replaceChild(newChild, oldChild)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The newChild parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
The oldChild parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

removeChild(oldChild)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The oldChild parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

appendChild(newChild)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The newChild parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

hasChildNodes()

This function returns a Boolean.

cloneNode(deep)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The deep parameter is a Boolean.

normalize()

This function has no return value.

isSupported(feature, version)

This function returns a Boolean.The feature parameter is a String.
The version parameter is a String.

hasAttributes()

This function returns a Boolean.

compareDocumentPosition(other)

This function returns a Number.The other parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

isSameNode(other)

This function returns a Boolean.The other parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.

lookupPrefix(namespaceURI)

This function returns a String.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.

isDefaultNamespace(namespaceURI)

This function returns a Boolean.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.

lookupNamespaceURI(prefix)

This function returns a String.The prefix parameter is a String.

isEqualNode(arg)

This function returns a Boolean.The arg parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.

getFeature(feature, version)

This function returns an object that implements the Object interface.The feature parameter is a String.
The version parameter is a String.

setUserData(key, data, handler)

This function returns an object that implements the any type interface.The key parameter is a String.
The data parameter is an object that implements the any type interface.
The handler parameter is an object that implements the UserDataHandler interface.

getUserData(key)

This function returns an object that implements the any type interface.The key parameter is a String.

Objects that implement the NodeList interface:

Properties of objects that implement the NodeList interface:

length

This read-only property is a Number.

Functions of objects that implement the NodeList interface:

item(index)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The index parameter is a Number.
Note: This object can also be dereferenced using square bracket notation (e.g. obj[1]). Dereferencing with an integer index is equivalent to invoking the item function with that index.

Objects that implement the NamedNodeMap interface:

Properties of objects that implement the NamedNodeMap interface:

length

This read-only property is a Number.

Functions of objects that implement the NamedNodeMap interface:

getNamedItem(name)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The name parameter is a String.

setNamedItem(arg)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The arg parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

removeNamedItem(name)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The name parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

item(index)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The index parameter is a Number.
Note: This object can also be dereferenced using square bracket notation (e.g. obj[1]). Dereferencing with an integer index is equivalent to invoking the item function with that index.

getNamedItemNS(namespaceURI, localName)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

setNamedItemNS(arg)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The arg parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

removeNamedItemNS(namespaceURI, localName)

This function returns an object that implements the Node interface.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

Objects that implement the CharacterData interface:

Objects that implement the CharacterData interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the CharacterData interface:

data

This property is a String, can raise an object that implements DOMException interface on setting and can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface on retrieval.

length

This read-only property is a Number.

Functions of objects that implement the CharacterData interface:

substringData(offset, count)

This function returns a String.The offset parameter is a Number.
The count parameter is a Number.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

appendData(arg)

This function has no return value.
The arg parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

insertData(offset, arg)

This function has no return value.
The offset parameter is a Number.
The arg parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

deleteData(offset, count)

This function has no return value.
The offset parameter is a Number.
The count parameter is a Number.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

replaceData(offset, count, arg)

This function has no return value.
The offset parameter is a Number.
The count parameter is a Number.
The arg parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

Objects that implement the Attr interface:

Objects that implement the Attr interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the Attr interface:

name

This read-only property is a String.

specified

This read-only property is a Boolean.

value

This property is a String and can raise an object that implements DOMException interface on setting.

ownerElement

This read-only property is an object that implements the Element interface.

schemaTypeInfo

This read-only property is an object that implements the TypeInfo interface.

Functions of objects that implement the Attr interface:

isId()

This function returns a Boolean.

Objects that implement the Element interface:

Objects that implement the Element interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the Element interface:

tagName

This read-only property is a String.

schemaTypeInfo

This read-only property is an object that implements the TypeInfo interface.

Functions of objects that implement the Element interface:

getAttribute(name)

This function returns a String.The name parameter is a String.

setAttribute(name, value)

This function has no return value.
The name parameter is a String.
The value parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

removeAttribute(name)

This function has no return value.
The name parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getAttributeNode(name)

This function returns an object that implements the Attr interface.The name parameter is a String.

setAttributeNode(newAttr)

This function returns an object that implements the Attr interface.The newAttr parameter is an object that implements the Attr interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

removeAttributeNode(oldAttr)

This function returns an object that implements the Attr interface.The oldAttr parameter is an object that implements the Attr interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getElementsByTagName(name)

This function returns an object that implements the NodeList interface.The name parameter is a String.

getAttributeNS(namespaceURI, localName)

This function returns a String.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

setAttributeNS(namespaceURI, qualifiedName, value)

This function has no return value.
The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The qualifiedName parameter is a String.
The value parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

removeAttributeNS(namespaceURI, localName)

This function has no return value.
The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getAttributeNodeNS(namespaceURI, localName)

This function returns an object that implements the Attr interface.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

setAttributeNodeNS(newAttr)

This function returns an object that implements the Attr interface.The newAttr parameter is an object that implements the Attr interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getElementsByTagNameNS(namespaceURI, localName)

This function returns an object that implements the NodeList interface.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

hasAttribute(name)

This function returns a Boolean.The name parameter is a String.

hasAttributeNS(namespaceURI, localName)

This function returns a Boolean.The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

setIdAttribute(name, isId)

This function has no return value.
The name parameter is a String.
The isId parameter is a Boolean.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

setIdAttributeNS(namespaceURI, localName, isId)

This function has no return value.
The namespaceURI parameter is a String.
The localName parameter is a String.
The isId parameter is a Boolean.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

setIdAttributeNode(idAttr, isId)

This function has no return value.
The idAttr parameter is an object that implements the Attr interface.
The isId parameter is a Boolean.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

Objects that implement the Text interface:

Objects that implement the Text interface have all properties and functions of the CharacterData interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the Text interface:

wholeText

This read-only property is a String.

Functions of objects that implement the Text interface:

splitText(offset)

This function returns an object that implements the Text interface.The offset parameter is a Number.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

isWhitespaceInElementContent()

This function returns a Boolean.

replaceWholeText(content)

This function returns an object that implements the Text interface.The content parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

Objects that implement the Comment interface:

Objects that implement the Comment interface have all properties and functions of the CharacterData interface.

Objects that implement the TypeInfo interface:

Properties of objects that implement the TypeInfo interface:

typeName

This read-only property is a String.

typeNamespace

This read-only property is a String.

Properties of the UserDataHandler Constructor function:

UserDataHandler.NODE_CLONED

The value of the constant UserDataHandler.NODE_CLONED is 1.

UserDataHandler.NODE_IMPORTED

The value of the constant UserDataHandler.NODE_IMPORTED is 2.

UserDataHandler.NODE_DELETED

The value of the constant UserDataHandler.NODE_DELETED is 3.

UserDataHandler.NODE_RENAMED

The value of the constant UserDataHandler.NODE_RENAMED is 4.

Objects that implement the UserDataHandler interface:

Functions of objects that implement the UserDataHandler interface:

handle(operation, key, data, src, dst)

This function has no return value.
The operation parameter is a Number.
The key parameter is a String.
The data parameter is an object that implements the Object interface.
The src parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.
The dst parameter is an object that implements the Node interface.

Properties of the DOMError Constructor function:

DOMError.SEVERITY_WARNING

The value of the constant DOMError.SEVERITY_WARNING is 0.

DOMError.SEVERITY_ERROR

The value of the constant DOMError.SEVERITY_ERROR is 1.

DOMError.SEVERITY_FATAL_ERROR

The value of the constant DOMError.SEVERITY_FATAL_ERROR is 2.

Objects that implement the DOMError interface:

Properties of objects that implement the DOMError interface:

severity

This read-only property is a Number.

message

This read-only property is a String.

type

This read-only property is a String.

relatedException

This read-only property is an object that implements the Object interface.

relatedData

This read-only property is an object that implements the Object interface.

location

This read-only property is an object that implements the DOMLocator interface.

Objects that implement the DOMErrorHandler interface:

Functions of objects that implement the DOMErrorHandler interface:

handleError(error)

This function returns a Boolean.The error parameter is an object that implements the DOMError interface.

Objects that implement the DOMLocator interface:

Properties of objects that implement the DOMLocator interface:

lineNumber

This read-only property is a Number.

columnNumber

This read-only property is a Number.

offset

This read-only property is a Number.

relatedNode

This read-only property is an object that implements the Node interface.

uri

This read-only property is a String.

Objects that implement the DOMConfiguration interface:

Functions of objects that implement the DOMConfiguration interface:

setParameter(name, value)

This function has no return value.
The name parameter is a String.
The value parameter is an object that implements the any type interface.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

getParameter(name)

This function returns an object that implements the any type interface.The name parameter is a String.
This function can raise an object that implements the DOMException interface.

canSetParameter(name, value)

This function returns a Boolean.The name parameter is a String.
The value parameter is an object that implements the any type interface.

Objects that implement the CDATASection interface:

Objects that implement the CDATASection interface have all properties and functions of the Text interface.

Objects that implement the DocumentType interface:

Objects that implement the DocumentType interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the DocumentType interface:

name

This read-only property is a String.

entities

This read-only property is an object that implements the NamedNodeMap interface.

notations

This read-only property is an object that implements the NamedNodeMap interface.

publicId

This read-only property is a String.

systemId

This read-only property is a String.

internalSubset

This read-only property is a String.

Objects that implement the Notation interface:

Objects that implement the Notation interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the Notation interface:

publicId

This read-only property is a String.

systemId

This read-only property is a String.

Objects that implement the Entity interface:

Objects that implement the Entity interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the Entity interface:

publicId

This read-only property is a String.

systemId

This read-only property is a String.

notationName

This read-only property is a String.

actualEncoding

This read-only property is a String.

xmlEncoding

This property is a String.

xmlVersion

This property is a String.

Objects that implement the EntityReference interface:

Objects that implement the EntityReference interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface.

Objects that implement the ProcessingInstruction interface:

Objects that implement the ProcessingInstruction interface have all properties and functions of the Node interface as well as the properties and functions defined below.

Properties of objects that implement the ProcessingInstruction interface:

target

This read-only property is a String.

data

This property is a String and can raise an object that implements DOMException interface on setting.

Note:
In addition of having DOMConfiguration parameters
exposed to the application using the setParameter
and getParameter, those parameters are also exposed
as ECMAScript properties on the DOMConfiguration
object. The name of the parameter is converted into a property
name using a camel-case convention: the character '-'
(HYPHEN-MINUS) is removed and the following character is
being replaced by its uppercase equivalent.

09 June 2003

Appendix I: Acknowledgements

Many people contributed to the DOM specifications (Level 1, 2 or 3),
including members of the DOM Working Group and the DOM Interest Group. We
especially thank the following:

I.1 Production Systems

This specification was written in XML. The HTML, OMG IDL, Java and
ECMAScript bindings were all produced automatically.

Thanks to Joe English, author of cost, which was used as the
basis for producing DOM Level 1. Thanks also to Gavin Nicol, who wrote
the scripts which run on top of cost. Arnaud Le Hors and Philippe Le
Hégaret maintained the scripts.

After DOM Level 1, we used Xerces as the basis DOM
implementation and wish to thank the authors. Philippe Le Hégaret
and Arnaud Le Hors wrote the Java
programs which are the DOM application.

Thanks also to Jan Kärrman, author of html2ps, which we use
in creating the PostScript version of the specification.

09 June 2003

Glossary

Editors:

Arnaud Le Hors, W3C

Robert S. Sutor, IBM Research (for DOM Level 1)

Several of the following term definitions have been borrowed or
modified from similar definitions in other W3C or standards documents.
See the links within the definitions for more information.

The base unit of a DOMString. This indicates that
indexing on a DOMString occurs in units of 16 bits.
This must not be misunderstood to mean that a DOMString
can store arbitrary 16-bit units. A DOMString is a
character string encoded in UTF-16; this means that the restrictions
of UTF-16 as well as the other relevant restrictions on character strings
must be maintained. A single character, for example in the form of a
numeric character reference, may correspond to one or two 16-bit units.

A [client] application is any software that uses the
Document Object Model programming interfaces provided by the
hosting implementation to accomplish useful work. Some
examples of client applications are scripts within an HTML
or XML document.

A convenience method is an operation on an
object that could be accomplished by a program consisting of
more basic operations on the object. Convenience methods are
usually provided to make the API easier and simpler to use or to
allow specific programs to create more optimized implementations
for common operations. A similar definition holds for a
convenience property.

There is an ordering, document order, defined on all
the nodes in the document corresponding to the order in which the first
character of the XML representation of each node occurs in the XML
representation of the document after expansion of general entities. Thus,
the document element node
will be the first node. Element nodes occur before their children. Thus,
document order orders element nodes in order of the occurrence of their
start-tag in the XML (after expansion of entities). The attribute nodes
of an element occur after the element and before its children. The
relative order of attribute nodes is implementation-dependent.

The programming language defined by the ECMA-262 standard
[ECMAScript]. As stated in the standard, the
originating technology for ECMAScript was JavaScript [JavaScript]. Note that in the ECMAScript binding, the word
"property" is used in the same sense as the IDL term
"attribute."

Each document contains one or more elements, the
boundaries of which are either delimited by start-tags and
end-tags, or, for empty elements by an empty-element tag.
Each element has a type, identified by name, and may have a
set of attributes. Each attribute has a name and a value.
See Logical
Structures in XML [XML 1.0].

A [hosting] implementation is a software module that
provides an implementation of the DOM interfaces so that a
client application can use them. Some examples of hosting
implementations are browsers, editors and document
repositories.

The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a
simple markup language used to create hypertext documents
that are portable from one platform to another. HTML
documents are SGML documents with generic semantics that are
appropriate for representing information from a wide range
of applications. [HTML 4.01]

In object-oriented programming, the ability to create new
classes (or interfaces) that contain all the methods and properties
of another class (or interface), plus additional methods and
properties. If class (or interface) D inherits from class (or
interface) B, then D is said to be derived from B. B is
said to be a base class (or interface) for D. Some
programming languages allow for multiple inheritance, that is,
inheritance from more than one class or interface.

An interface is a declaration of a set of
methods with no information given about their implementation.
In object systems that support interfaces and inheritance,
interfaces can usually inherit from one another.

A programming language binding for an IDL
specification is an implementation of the interfaces in the
specification for the given language. For example, a Java
language binding for the Document Object Model IDL
specification would implement the concrete Java classes that
provide the functionality exposed by the
interfaces.

A model is the actual data representation
for the information at hand. Examples are the structural
model and the style model representing the parse structure
and the style information associated with a document. The
model might be a tree, or a directed graph, or something
else.

A namespace URI is a URI that identifies an XML
namespace. This is called the namespace name in
Namespaces in XML [XML Namespaces]. See also sections 1.3.2 "DOM
URIs" and 1.3.3 "XML
Namespaces" regarding URIs and namespace URIs
handling and comparison in the DOM APIs.

A node in a DOM tree is partially valid if it is
well formed (this part is for
comments and processing instructions) and its immediate children are
those expected by the content model. The node may be missing trailing
required children yet still be considered partially
valid.

A qualified name is the name of an element or
attribute defined as the concatenation of a local name
(as defined in this specification), optionally preceded by a
namespace prefix and colon character. See Qualified Names in
Namespaces in XML [XML Namespaces].

A read only node is a node that is immutable. This
means its list of children, its content, and its attributes, when it
is an element, cannot be changed in any way. However, a read only node
can possibly be moved, when it is not itself contained in a read only
node.

The description given to various information items (for example,
attribute values of various types, but not including the StringType
CDATA) after having been processed by the XML processor. The process
includes stripping leading and trailing white space, and replacing
multiple space characters by one. See the definition of
tokenized type.

A node is a well-formed XML node if its
serialized form, without doing any transformation during its
serialization, matches its respective production in [XML 1.0] or [XML 1.1] (depending on the XML
version in use) with all well-formedness constraints related
to that production, and if the entities which are referenced
within the node are also well-formed. If namespaces for XML
are in use, the node must also be namespace
well-formed.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an
extremely simple dialect of SGML which is completely
described in this document. The goal is to enable generic
SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the
way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed
for ease of implementation and for interoperability with
both SGML and HTML. [XML 1.0]

09 June 2003

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For the latest version of any W3C specification please consult the list of
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http://www.w3.org/TR.

ECMAScript Language Specification, Third
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ISO/IEC 10646-2000 (E). Information technology -
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